Happy Monday, all!

Headphones recommended! I highlighted some things you can listen for.

Apple Music
Spotify
YouTube

The opening is meticulously constructed:
Some slowed-down guitar whammy noise on the right, then two backward thumps on the left.
Three guitars - an acoustic and two electrics?
A bass note - the bass part overall is omnipresent yet unnoticeable.
What sounds like a backward strum on the left turns into a normal acoustic guitar part on the right, as the drums and the main riff kick in.

Sonar ping - like from an old war movie. Dead center. It happens around the 4 of each measure, slightly after it. I can’t exactly count it. Woodblock? A voice?

Drums

Very dry, very tucked — a sharp contrast to “the snare must be heard at all costs!” mentality of contemporary recordings. I think there are multiple overdubs. There’s a ride and snare kind of center to right, a floor tom to the left. Verse and chorus are almost the same thing, but at the turnaround, there’s a snare-floor tom-rack-tom fill (right to left to center) distinctly slowing the tempo for a moment. Love this change-up in feel. Don’t think this was cut to a click track.

Vocals

Very straightforward in the verses. Wet and pulled back a bit. An occasional double. The chorus is at least three tracks, with a phased sounding delay/reverb swooshing thing pulling to the sides - left then right?

Guitars

Graham Coxon is a very underrated player. 2nd verse is like a punk/modern take on Little Wing. The solo is three guitars. He cut the parts sitting on his amp, hence feedback. Coxon was into grunge and you can really hear it here. The solo could be off a Soundgarden album.

The Chorus

Oh my! Rich and swirling! A total uplift! Vocals! Cymbals! Guitar lead lines, an organ, a mellotron!

A Break after the solo. ...but then things come back in distinctly out of time.

Vamp Out

It’s a chorus that’s slightly abbreviated. They repeat it twice and then there’s a very audible edit at 4:33 - on the word “find.” My guess is they repeated the vamp a bunch and then decided to cut it down. I can’t be sure, but it sounds like they edited the master and didn’t quite nail it — the F of “Find” sounds cut off - “ind” not “find.” I love hearing stuff like this.

In the fade, not a boat motor, but a Hammond organ. The pitch drops right as the song ends. Did someone just press stop on the deck?

Gorgeous production by Stephen Street, who did The Smiths, The Cranberries, and of course, Blur. Interview with him here.

Forget the production for a moment. What does this song mean? What does it mean to you? What’s it about?

For me, it is about the loneliness and sadness of starting over. But there’s hope. Yes, this is a low point in your life, but you’ll get through it.

It came out thirty years ago. I found it interesting but too Britpop. It didn’t fit in with the heavier stuff I was producing at the time, so I didn’t find it too useful or inspirational. Radiohead’s The Bends knocked me out. Blur, not so much.

In 2025, this song wipes me out. I tear up when I hear it.

Obviously, I’ve changed, because the music hasn’t.

This is a Low

This is a Low was the standout track on Blur’s 1994 album Parklife. Parklife is a high point in Britpop, and certainly one of the great albums of the decade.

Parklife was cut at Maison Rouge, a studio established by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. It was a major place throughout the 80s and 90s. A lot of great music was made at Maison Rouge. The Internet Wayback Machine found this. Maison Rouge closed in 2000 and the building was razed.

This is a Low sat for weeks, basically complete, including the layered guitar solo, but without lyrics or vocals. Singer Damon Albarn was exhausted and had no ideas. Time was tight, the whole album was mixed, their record label, Food, was being typically difficult and pushing them, Albarn had to have hernia surgery... less than propitious circumstances.

But Albarn found inspiration: he’d been gifted a handkerchief with a weather map printed on it by Blur bassist Alex Jones. The map, more specifically, was of weather zones around the British Isles, the zones coinciding with a British radio program called The Shipping Forecast, which is exactly what it seems to be: weather reports for ships traveling the English Channel, the Irish Sea, etc. It turns out the band had a soft spot for The Shipping Forecast — they listened to it during an awful early tour of the United States. It made them feel less homesick. Albarn knocked out the lyrics, then the vocal, then went off to hospital to get his hernia fixed.

The lyrics are inspired by shipping zones — Dogger Bank, Cramity, etc. — with goofy rhymes and “Veddy English” wordplay.

Hit traffic on the Dogger bank
Up the Thames to find a taxi rank
Sail on by with the tide and go to sleep
And the radio says

And there’s a wonderful chorus:

This is a low
But it won't hurt you
When you are alone
It will be there with you
Finding ways to stay solo

This is a Low refers to a low-pressure zone, not some deep emotional state. You’ve all heard weather presenters saying, “This low-pressure zone is coming in from the north...”

Any of you ever get choked up from a weather report?

What is Meaning?

One of the central issues artists have with Ai music and Ai generated art in general, is that since Ai has only a statistical view of life, and can’t bring any sort of true emotional perspective to what it makes, the products it outputs are cold and sterile, and devoid of something human.

But as we can see from This Is a Low, it doesn’t matter what the meaning actually is, or what the intention or impulse was that gave birth to a thing. What matters is that a listener has some sort of receptor site inside for it. I made big life changes a year ago and now I’ve got a receptor site. Thirty years ago, This Is a Low meant nothing to me. In 2025 I can tear up over a song that’s about a weather map.

If people have the itch, they'll find something to scratch it.

Can Ai create output that people find moving? Yes. It can poop out love poetry without ever being in love. It can dump out songs, and in the next few years, some couple will get married and “their song” will be some well-chewed and digested, statistical mash of Just the Way You Are, Tonight I Celebrate My Love, All of Me and whatever else was snogged up. The couple will concoct it with Ai and then try to sell it on Spotify.

The lyrics might be like this: Until I die, let me hold you if you cry. Whether it rains or pours, I'm all yours.

Statistical Cliché

Sounds like the lyrics to an Ai wedding song, right? Fooled ya! It’s Coldplay, and they claim the song, ALL MY LOVE, will be their last single. A threat or a promise? By the way, officially, it’s ALL CAPS. They don’t want it confused with the Led Zeppelin tune from In Through the Out Door?

I associate Coldplay with numbers: in this case, seven songwriters and a further seven producers. It seems the more writers and producers involved, the more statistical and vanilla the song. Kinda explains Ai.

On the bright side, there’s this video, featuring just Chris Martin from the wading pool of writers and producers that is Coldplay, and Dick Van Dyke! It’s highly redemptive. The whole statistical potpourri is forgivable and elevated by a personage of such character and presence, humanity and individuality. He’s 99 years old and he still has it. What charisma! You can’t not watch him when he’s in the frame. Extra points for film and still clips from Mr. Van Dyke’s glorious career. Heck, turn the sound down and just watch the video.

The Point

Like microwave cooking, Ai will only get better, faster, cheaper. It's unlikely to be strictly regulated (that might not be a bad thing). It can mimic human voices, play every instrument and convince people it understands what’s inside them. Heck, it makes porn — what more evidence is needed as to its power?

What Ai can’t do yet, and perhaps never, is take a weather map and a radio show heard while depressed on a tour bus and, in a flash, turn it into a song. It takes human intuition to make that leap, or to decide to cut three guitar parts and blend them for the solo, or decide to keep that organ in during the fade. Or to wait until the very last moment, trusting for some inspiration.

I think the point is you must trust, and double down on your humanity. More on this later.

David Johansen

David Johanson, the flamboyant singer of those glam punk boys of the 70s, The New York Dolls, and better known in the 80s as the Amaretto-sipping Buster Poindexter, died. I found the New York Dolls and Buster Poindexter frivolous and fun and forgettable.

But I saw Mr Johansen on Saturday Night Live in the late 80s, and he laid down a gorgeous performance of a song he wrote, Heart of Gold. It clobbered me: I was going through an awful breakup and I remember crying during it. Always, the meaning we find is what we bring.

I searched and searched... and turned up this clip of it on TikTok. Thanks to Huggy SNL for keeping this alive.

https://www.tiktok.com/@huggyattack/video/7477059970047937823

Warm regards,

Luke

Happy Monday -

As I write this Dan and I are on a plane flying back to New York.

It has been a wild ride. We've been sitting on the Shure/Tchad Blake news for months, dying to tell you all about it, but bound by NDAs. There have been some hints dropped, and some of you figured out something was going on. A big step up for us.

The Level-Loc is getting a lot of attention, and I hope you all give it a spin and have some fun with it. Ours isn't just a drum smasher. It's really good all over the place and it's a lot of fun to use.

SO — NAMM...

NAMM is so huge, with so much stuff and people everywhere, it is hard to take it all in—it's hard to remember all that you see and all that happens there. And it's one thing to walk around NAMM, and yet another to work a booth. I spent nearly all of NAMM at our booth and I saw very little new gear, didn't get to play any guitars or get any cool swag.

But what I did get to do was talk to hundreds of people, and that's really the point of going to NAMM: to connect with friends, meet new ones, and in general celebrate the human side of the recording and musical instrument industry.

And it is absolutely a celebration.

There's no way I can give you a sense of NAMM as you might experience it. I spent most of the day on my feet behind the bar at Korneff's Plug Inn, demonstrating the Level-Loc and occasionally eating an expensive burrito. But here are some things that struck me as fun and funny, and maybe will give you a sense of what goes on at NAMM other than looking at stuff, buying $15 beers and thinking, "Is that Andrew Scheps?"

A guy who looked like Tchad Blake

We came up with the idea of a bar for our booth a few weeks ago, and plowed through designing backdrops, cocktail menus, coasters, t-shirts, found an IKEA knock-off bar unit online, and had all of this stuff shipped sight unseen to a buddy of ours, engineer and composer and all around brilliant musician Jason Soudah, who stored it all in his garage. On Tuesday, Dan and I flew into LAX, picked up a bunch of boxes from Jason, dumped everything at the Anaheim convention center, and then scrambled back to our AirBnB in Santa Ana a few miles away to launch the Shure Level-Loc.

We're awful at time management. We were making last-minute changes on the plug-in, the manual, the website, emails, until we passed out, then got up four hours later and did it some more. We managed to send an email out to all of you in which we spelled "Tchad Blake" as "Tchad Black."

Exhausted, rolled into the convention center to set up our booth around 1pm on Wednesday, with a bunch of tools, ready to put up our backdrop (3D modeled by Dan), and assemble our two bar units. But when we got to our booth, the backdrop was up, one of the bar units was fully built, and there was no one at it.

Who set up our booth? Certainly not Dan and I or anyone on our all-volunteer team.

NAMM has all sorts of rules. One of them was that if a booth isn't set up within an hour, the union workers at the Anaheim Convention Center swoop in, set it up and you get charged.

Were the mystery booth fairies union guys, and was our lateness going to cost us $1000?

Now we were concerned. We found a guy across the aisle and had a conversation that went like this:

"Hey, man. Did you see who set up our booth?"

"Yeah. It was these two guys. One had a shaved head and the other guy looked like Tchad Blake."

The shaved-headed guy was Matt Engstrom, director of Licensing for Shure, and the Tchad Blake looking guy was actually Tchad Blake.

Tchad Blake set up our booth. I said to our booth neighbor: "That actually WAS Tchad Blake. He set up our booth."

Booth neighbor stepped back, with a look on his face that seemed to say, "Who ARE these guys that Tchad Blake sets up their booth for them?"

Yes, Tchad Blake set up our booth, and he also helped take it down, and he spent hours and hours at it, usually helping people demo the Level-Loc. Kinda cool to watch people's reactions when they're working with an industry legend... "Oh my god. Tchad Blake is showing me how to compress drums..."
Tchad is that kind of guy. He's great. And if you think his mixes are good, his booth building skills are off the charts!

 

Selfies

Speaking of our booth, it was non-stop busy every day of the convention. Seems everyone wants to hang out at a bar. There was always a knot of people in front of it, a bunch of people on the bar stools messing with plug-ins, and new people coming in every few minutes.

Master film mixer Alan Meyerson stopped by. Lovely fella, really funny (most engineers have a great sense of humor). He and I have a mutual friend, the aforementioned Jason Soudah, who worked with Alan for a number of years at Hans Zimmer's studio in Santa Monica. Alan and I took a quick selfie to send to Jason:

Jason sent back this:

A most ridiculous picture. Jason had been up all night on a session and was just getting into bed when he snapped this.

We took a lot of pictures. They're all over our IG and FB.

The Birds of Santa Ana

Wednesday was windy, and I drove from our AirBnB to get coffee for Dan and a bunch of great friends who were helping us and staying in our AirBnB as well: Lawrence Ames from PluginFox, Justin Bennett and Alex Prieto. Lovely guys.

Got to a coffee place in downtown Santa Ana, popped out of the car to be greeted by the screams and cries of thousands of birds. Thousands. So loud as to be practically deafening. They were all over the trees and screaming like a scene out of The Birds. As I walked, they flew from tree-to-tree, as if following me. Here's a moment of it.

Lost in the Garage

The Anaheim Convention Center is huge - 1.8 million square feet (our booth was 100 square feet) and has thousands of parking spots. I'm a moron and also the designated driver on this trip.

Why put a forgetful moron in the position of designated driver? I think because it's funny and occasionally exciting, like when I made a u-turn from the far lane to get into the convention center.

On Friday, I parked our rental SUV — a freekin' land yacht with absolute ass visibility, and I felt fairly positive I parked it on level 43B. I took a picture of the sign but blurred the picture. Oh well. Can't be too hard to find a huge white carboat that's equipped with a dongle on the key that repeatedly beeps the horn and flashes the lights from a fairly far distance, right?

Ever heard of an acoustic phenomena called, "Critical Distance?" There is a point at which a reflected sound — the reflected sound of say, a car horn continuously beeping - is the same volume as the direct sound coming out of the bigass white SUV, and you can't localize the sound. You lose any sense of left to right. You have no idea where it is. Even if the lights are flashing.

So I'm pressing this button, the horn is honking, we're all exhausted, walking around this gigantic mostly empty garage with loud car horn sounds coming from seemingly everywhere. We walk this way, because it sounds like the car is over here until the acoustics change and it sounds like it's over there, so we walk that way and then suddenly it sounds behind us, and then we walk there and it seems to be a floor up, and then two floors down. Everyone has to pee. Eventually, we found it on level 41B. In my defense, I only had one digit wrong, and we all needed the exercise after standing all day.

Everyone pretended to be pissed, but secretly they had a good time and they let me drive the rest of the trip. And we all survived. Justin was especially delighted with the experience.

Rick Beato Likes My Sweater

I bought a pale green cardigan off some website that was probably just a front for Temu. It looked nice enough online; in person it's a little junky. The button holes look like finger holes more than an intentional orifice. My kids hate it. My son first saw me in it and said, "You look like a poor Dutch child." Weirdly specific.

Our booth "costume," so we looked like bartenders, was button-down shirts, suspenders and sleeve garters. In hindsight we looked more like bricklayers from the early 1900s. Dan wore his outfit the whole time.

I gradually morphed mine from looking like a bricklayer to a poor Dutch child. By the last day I was 100% poor Dutch child.

And on the last day, Rick Beato showed up, brought to our booth by a wonderful keyboardist, Kim Bullard. Kim deserves a New Monday just about Kim, and maybe that is in the future.

It was my first time meeting Rick. And he is EXACTLY like he is on his YouTube channel. Actually, everyone I met at NAMM, that you see in videos on YT or on Mix With the Masters — Tom Lord-Alge, Andrew Scheps, Alan Myerson, Stuart White, JJ Blair, Tchad — all of them are exactly who they appear to be. And they're all nice, really funny, charming and... just simply studio guys.

Rick Beato, though, has this other thing going on. It is hard to describe, and you see it in his interviews. He listens so well, and so closely, that... it's like he's 100% there for you. It doesn't matter who you are. If he's talking to you, you have all of his attention. And he also has this child-like enthusiasm — I've written about this before — when you talk to him it's like you're telling a toddler about Santa Claus. It's like he's going to explode.

We chatted about the Level-Loc, and a lot about how wonderful Shure is as a company (wrote about that last week here), Rick was all smiles and barely contained explosion.

But he's busy, NAMM is big, and as he and Kim left to wander deeper into the bowels of all the booths and gear, he suddenly turned and said, "I like your sweater."

I can't wait to tell my kids this story! I'm a little poor Dutch boy no longer!

It just occurred to me that if this was Japan, I would perhaps have to send Rick Beato my sweater? Isn't that a rule of etiquette in Japan? If someone compliments something you have to give it as a gift?

I Shure like that Level-Loc!

NAMM Shoutouts

Aside from Lawrence, Justin and Alex, who helped out both building Korneff's Plug Inn, manning it, and tearing it down, thanks and props to the wonderful Chaz Root and his wife, JJ. Chaz was tremendous: demo'ing plug-ins, talking to people, bringing by friends — thank you Chaz and JJ.

And shout out and thanks to all of you guys who stopped by and were so nice and enthusiastic. And thank you for all the wonderful feedback I got about this little New Monday project that I started almost a year ago. Truly, I never thought this newsletter thinger would mean anything to people, but evidently it does. Thank you for making that clear to me.

This was a long one! Thanks for reading it.

Warm regards,
Luke

Happy Monday,

We are days away from NAMM. There is high excitement in the Korneff Audio Sphere of Influence.

Are you planning on going to NAMM? Please stop by our booth (#16124) and say hi.

Ok. Twenty days into 2025, and it's not too late to decide what you're going to do with this year. After all, the year is still making up its mind about what it's going to do to you!

I have two inspirations on my radar, and since they're both audio-related, I'll share them.

SHURE - Capitalism Done Right

My first mic was a Shure. Everything in my life that has to do with recording music started with that mic.

I had the pleasure of visiting Shure's headquarters in Niles, Illinois, (call it Chicago) back in October. What an eye-opener.

We all know Shure as a maker of microphones and headphones, wireless mics, perhaps phonograph cartridges, some ancient hardware that was in the PA rack in the high school gym, etc. The microphones are great, as are the headphones, but really, the whole company is great.

Shure is basically a military defense contractor that doesn't make weapons. In the early 1940s, Shure was contracted by the US Military to produce microphones for the war effort. Equipment produced for use in a tank or a dive bomber has to be built to an incredibly high standard of reliability and ruggedness. Hitting MIL-SPEC standards is a huge investment in research and development, quality control, testing — it requires a total rethinking of the way things are done. For Shure, it was an inflection point.

Sidney N. Shure, the founder of the company back in the 1920s, decided that rather than make consumer-grade and military-grade electronics, Shure was only going to make military-grade. EVERYTHING was going to be military-grade, whether it went in a tank or a kick drum. That has been the philosophy of Shure ever since.

These people are over the top. They have robots bending cables a million times, they have machines specifically designed to drop mics on their grills. There's bottles of artificially made human sweat they spray all over lavaliers and in-ear monitors. They try to break everything. They have a space full of Shure products that were horrifically damaged but still work. Mics broken by Roger Daltry. Mics run over by bulldozers. SM-57s recovered from swimming pools and fires that still work. They also have a world-class recording studio, anechoic chambers, and all sorts of testing equipment because not only should Shure stuff last forever, it should sound great. The Shure gang are quality-obsessed.

It goes beyond that. The company is full of lovely people. The turnover rate is really low—people stay at Shure for decades and never leave because it has a great corporate culture. But it's beyond that.
There's a plaque in the "Shure Museum," which is an extended, wide hallway in their headquarters, which is itself a futuristic building out of a StarTrek episode. The plaque is a quote from Sydney Shure, affectionately referred to as Mr Shure:

It's that "Community" aspect I want to focus on. Shure flows money into a network of charities in and around their physical plants and around the world. Its employees are encouraged (and given days off) to participate in charitable activities like the Chicago Children's Choir, Special Olympics, Christmas gift drives. Shure is not a company myopically making money for faceless shareholders. Shure is awesome.

Proof of Shure's awesomeness: they don't talk about the altruistic stuff they do. It's not a talking point in their marketing plan. It's just who the company is at a deep level. I've been in the industry 40 years and had no idea what Shure was really about until I took the tour at their headquarters. And if you're ever in Chicagoland, try to get a tour of their headquarters. You'll leave blown away and inspired.

So, for how to conduct business, let's all be like Shure in 2025. Let's make great stuff and be good to everyone. Let's do capitalism right.

When I grow up I want to be as young as Tchad Blake

The engineer/producer/mixer Tchad Blake has been popping up in a number of New Monday episodes. I've always thought highly of his records, but the dude is a very inspiring guy.

Tchad is around 70, but he experiences the world with fresh, child-like ears and eyes. He's constantly looking for something new, something he hasn't seen or heard yet. Everything is an exciting experiment in progress. I'm bitching about how Ai will change everything and Tchad's thinking about the cool stuff people might do with the technology.

He also appears to be egoless. Here's a guy who knows tons, has tons of credits, but never assumes for a moment he's the smartest guy in the room, or the studio. He asks the assistants questions and listens to the answers. He's always learning.

And of course, he's wildly creative, ruthlessly experimental, and he makes great sounding, interesting, substantial records. We put together a Tchad Blake playlist for you all, and we'll keep adding to it, because Tchad is still making stuff really worth hearing.

Tchad Blake YouTube Playlist

So, for 2025, let's approach art, music and creativity like Tchad Blake does, as something new that's there for our inspiration and education.

I don't often fanboy, but I'm definitely a fan of Shure and of Tchad. It's not often you meet your heroes and they're better than what you've imagined.

Shoot me a message if you're going to be at NAMM.

Happy New Year - last time I'll wish this to you all until... next year.

Warm regards,
Luke

Happy Monday -

NAMM is about 10 days away. Dan and I are really excited about it - our first booth!

#16124, located in North Level One of the Anaheim Convention Center. Please stop by!

As most of you know, California is being ravaged by wildfires.

The fire is ravaging homes and communities, which is awful, but California, and the area that’s on fire, is a center of culture. Countless artists have lost their homes and studios. Architectural landmarks and historic businesses are gone. Fire surrounds the Getty Villa museum. We have friends who’ve lost their home studios. Mixer Bob Clearmountain’s home and studio are no longer.

At this point NAMM is full steam ahead—Anaheim is hours from where the fires are, and hopefully, things don’t get any worse.

So, I’m thinking about California a bit this week. California... California...

California...

Here’s a song to listen to... Tchad Blake’s Mix

The production team of Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake knocked it out of the park on this one. As a single it did ok, but it really got a kick when it became the opening theme to the TV show The OC. Tchad Blake mixed the album cut as well as the TV version.

'California' was also remixed by Jack Joseph Puig, I’m guessing for the single. It’s pretty different. Have a listen here.

It’s always cool and interesting to listen to the same tracks mixed by two different masters of the art form.

Here are the songwriter credits... this gets interesting: Alex Greenwald, Jason Schwartzman, Joseph Meyer, B.G. De Sylva.

California Here I Come

Jason Schwatzman the actor actually quit the band as his acting career took off. Alex Greenwald is the singer on the recording. Who the heck are Joseph Meyer and B.G. De Sylva?

They were songwriters at the turn of the century - not this century, the other one, like around 1922. Meyer wrote musicals, De Sylva was his decade’s version of Quincy Jones and then some, writing songs, producing movies, co-founding Capitol Records in 1944. The two men grew up in California and wrote a hit together for the singer Al Jolson. The song? California Here I Come! And evidently, they’ve got copyright on that title and phrase, and that’s how they wound up with a songwriting credit after both of them were dead.

California Here I Come was a HUGE Hit. There was an attempt to make it the state song, but alas, it didn’t work. California’s state song is this.

I know 'California Here I Come' from Bugs Bunny. This is the version in my head.

The Loony Tunes people went berserk with the song, using it in a ton of cartoons. Someone in internetland made a compilation of all the times it was used. Oh my god! What an amazing thing! I grew up with Bugs and Daffy and Elmer and the whole Loony Tunes crew.

Loony Tunes is the basis of my personality. Loony Tunes and SCTV.

Blue California

There are plenty of happy California songs. I think I prefer the depressing ones.

Joni Mitchell wrote a beautiful California, released in 1971 on her album Blue. Self-produced, with Joni handling all the songwriting and the lion's share of playing, Blue is on every list of top 100 albums of all times, 10 albums you must hear before you die, etc. Deservedly so. It’s so personal and deeply felt it’s almost painful to listen to, like a stranger coming up to you at a party and telling you about this awful breakup they just had, how terrible their life is, how love only leads to utter despair and on and on. You’ve just met this person. And now you’re wet with their tears.

Blue was a huge success, breaking into the top 20 in the US and England, and getting to #9 in Canada. There was a time when a deeply weird and complex break-up album like Blue could have a huge commercial impact.

Delta Spirit

Speaking of sad, break-up songs called California, there’s a gorgeous knife in the heart of a tune by San Diego’s Delta Spirit. I don’t usually think watching a video enhances a musical experience, but in this case, the music and the video foil each other, each telling their own story, the video more suggesting what characters in the song might be doing outside of the timeline of the song. And in the end... is the girl changed, or is she biding her time?

Watch California by Delta Spirit here. Heartbreakingly good.

That’s all for this week. I have to get back to NAMM prep. We’ll be sharing things with you all on our Facebook Page and Instagram.

Speaking of sharing, if you want to donate to help the victims of the fire, this is a good organization to donate to.

Stay safe, all of you.

Warm regards,

Luke

 

Happy Monday, People!

Here we are, a brand new year! So many things to blow up! Where to start??

Here’s a song to listen to while you read: Time Waits for No One.

Meet Us at NAMM

It’s our first time with a booth, #16124, at NAMM! We are very excited and you’re invited to stop by and hang out! Use this handy map:

Evidently, all roads lead to booth #16124.

We also have a surprise, or three, up our sleeves... stay tuned and we’ll keep you informed in a suspenseful way.

Time Waits for No One

This is a lost gem from the Rolling Stones. Cut in 1974 and released on 'It’s Only Rock and Roll' album, it’s a gorgeous song that no one seems to know.

This was a weird time (pun!) for the Stones. They cast-off long-time producer Jimmy Miller, who had worked with the band since 1968’s 'Beggars Banquet' and through their "golden period.” Miller developed a debilitating drug habit (which seems to happen a lot when you hang around The Rolling Stones) and 'It’s Only Rock and Roll' was the first album produced by The Glimmer Twins, the sobriquet of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

'It’s Only Rock and Roll' is a liminal album for the Stones—liminal is a grad school word that refers to a space between things, a transition point. Hallways are liminal, in between rooms. Liminal albums are snapshots of a moment between stages in the evolution of an artist or a band. Liminal albums are often really interesting, if a bit wobbly. Some liminal albums, like the two The Beatles released, 'Rubber Soul' and 'Revolver', are the best moments of a career.

'Beggars Banquet' was liminal, as the band shed founder Brian Jones, threw out pretensions of competing with The Beatles, and returned to blues rock. They did, however, hang onto some of the sonic experimentation with which they indulged (perhaps overindulged) on 'At Her Majesty’s Satanic Request'. The result was 'Beggars Banquet' rocked out, with a rare combination of great songs combined with lots of percussion, and unusual recording techniques, like running guitars and drums through cassette recorders to get a sort of hybrid electric acoustic sound. Street Fighting Man is such a killer track.

Likewise, 'It’s Only Rock and Roll' was liminal, as the Stones transitioned from a bunch of wild kids into “elder statesmen” — everyone in the core band was in their thirties. Guitarist Mick Taylor left (he developed a drug habit), Ron Wood started hanging around, and the band evolved into the line-up that would take them into the 1990s. The next bunch of albums were compilations and the Stones lost their footing until 1978’s "Some Girls.“ Regardless, the adventure and innovation of the early 70s Stones was gone.

'Time Waits for No One' features lovely, modal guitar solos by Mick Taylor, lush instrumentation with acoustic guitars and flanged electrics, percussion, piano, and a synth meowing like a cat in the background. The final mix is cloudy and seems unfocused and lost, but that seems to work with the lyrics, which are some of Mick Jagger’s most poetic.

Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by
Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes

Time can tear down a building or destroy a woman's face
Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste

Men, they build towers to their passing
Yes, to their fame everlasting

Here he comes, chopping and reaping
Hear him laugh at their cheating

Drink in your summer, gather your corn
The dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn

And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me
And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me

Sounds like someone is considering their age and what’s next, huh?

Liminal indeed.

Liminality in Record Production

The in-between places on recordings, the transitions between sections, were always something I thought about and carefully approached in the studio. About a year ago I wrote a bunch on this, so this is just a quick refresher — some ideas for a New Year.

Consider how the song moves from a verse to a chorus. How is that transition being handled? Is a new instrument coming in to introduce it, or is something dropping out to make room? In rock, often transitions are indicated by drum fills. What sort of fills are happening in that liminal moment? Is it the drums alone, or is there a bit of a guitar or keyboard part in there as well? I think of transition points as gates, a narrow passage between song sections, and part of the job of the arrangement is to figure out how to get through that gate. Do instruments go through it one after the other, or does one lead, or do they all play the same part and go through as a team?

Some ideas and examples:

Drums start then lock in with the bass

Lovely transition here: instruments hand off to each other, like a waterfall or a stairway down

This is a mess, but it works. The whole song is a mess but it works.

Another liminal moment that deserves attention are song bridges and breaks.

A bridge is exactly that, a walkway from one part of the song to another. I also think of a bridge as a moment in which the song "changes its mind,” where there’s a shift in viewpoint. This is especially common lyrically. As an example, you have a song where the singer is complaining about how lonely they are, and in the bridge they realize it’s their own fault.

Army

Great example: Army, by Ben Folds Five. The song is about a kid dropping out of college and wondering what to do next—the chorus is literally “been thinking a lot today.” In the bridge, we hear his actual ideas on what he’s going to do next, and this is supported by a bunch of abrupt changes in style, tempo, and mood, going from a fuzz bass thing, to a tack piano breakdown, to another fuzz bass break, and then into one of the most kick ass horn section parts ever. And then it glides back to “thinking a lot today” and the protagonist is back on his bed staring at the ceiling, stuck in a liminal space, thinking "what do I do next?"

Good lord, what a flipping amazing song.

Happy New Year. I hope it’s a great year for you, full of adventure and meaning, and if you’re stuck in a liminal situation at least make it interesting!

Warm Regards,
Luke

 

The first thing you can do is stop thinking of reverb as a ramification of physics.

Don't think of using reverb as an acoustic effect. Think about using it as an emotional effect, or a narrative effect. Lyrically, is the song set in the present or the past, or is it perhaps in both? Can reverb be used to differentiate the past from the present, or the present from the future? What does the past sound like? Is the future wet or dry? When the singer is in their head, what does that sound like? What is the reverb of thoughts?

Is the character in different spaces during the song? Is there a bedroom, or a kitchen? Is the character in one place during the verse and another place during the chorus? This might be something you decide that's not based on the lyrics. It can just be a decision you make.

Control the sense of space and intimacy. Reverb is distance. Want a vocal part to sound like it's in the listeners' ear? Dry it up and pan it hard. Control the depth of the soundstage by putting some things farther away than others. What's in the back of the room? What's in your face? Make decisions, damnit!

The listener probably will never go, "Ah, the singer is in the bedroom in their past, then dreams they're in a canyon, then they yell in a bathroom." And honestly, you don't want your listener noticing all that stuff, that would be like watching an old Godzilla movie hoping to see the strings moving everything. But you do want your listener to "lose" themself in the song, and you do that with small, well-thought out decisions. It's like when you eat food prepared by an excellent chef. You don't know what little tricks they're up to. You're not thinking, "Ah, this butter has had the solids removed so it is actually closer to ghee." You're just thinking, "Man, this is delicious."

We want people to hear the results of our work, not retrace our exact steps. We're not making records for other engineers to like.

Put two different reverbs on two channels and pan them so that one reverb is on the left, the other on the right. Then, feed the signal that you want reverb on to channels, or more one than the other - whatever you want. The more different the two reverbs are, the weirder this effect gets. A short decay time on the left and a long decay time on the right will move the reverb across the speakers from left to right. There are all sorts of things you can do with this set-up.

Set really long pre-delay times. Pre-delay corresponds to how close the nearest wall is in a space. In a small space, the nearest wall is only a few feet away, but in an aircraft hangar, the nearest wall might be hundreds of feet away, so there will be a long pause between the direct sound and the start of the reverberant sound. Our ear makes decisions about the kind of space it is in based on when it hears the initial return of the room, ie., the pre-delay. So, a small room with a huge pre-delay sounds very unnatural, as does a huge room with a very short pre-delay. This is a fun thing to experiment with; it adds a bit of "acoustic confusion" into the mix. Perhaps tie the use of it into the lyrical or emotional content of the song. Like, the singer is expressing doubt or confusion in a section, and to heighten that, add a short reverb with a long pre-delay, which not only pops the lyrics out but also gives the listener a hint of confusion.

Compress your reverb returns. Stick a compressor on the insert of the return channel and squash that stuff. Play with the attack and release. Can you get the reverb to "breathe" along with the tempo of the track? Long attacks will increase the "punch" of the reverb. Short attacks and releases can lend an almost backwards sound to the reverb. Experiment with putting the compressor both before and after the reverb in the insert — you'll get wildly different results.

Duck your reverb returns. Put a compressor on the return (you pick the spot in the insert chain) and then key that compressor to duck the reverb. If you key the compressor off, say, the vocal you're putting reverb on, you'll get a very clear vocal with reverb blossoming whenever the singing stops, and there's no automation needed. What about ducking the backing vocal reverb with the lead vocal, especially if there is an alternating quality to the two parts? You can also key reverbs off percussion so that the kick or the snare stops the reverb for a moment, which can give you all sorts of rhythmic effects in addition to giving your mix clarity. Remember, reverb tends to muddy things up, so if you're ducking during busier sections of the song, you're going to increase clarity in those sections, and differ the effect of the reverb 'til a moment after, so the track will be clean but still have an overall wet quality.

Gate and Key your reverb returns. Gated reverb is a staple effect on drums from the late 70s, to the point where it is a cliché, but gating a reverb and then keying it from another sound source is still a fun thing with which to experiment. Key percussion with itself to get a classic gated reverb effect on something other than a snare. Gate the reverb of a tambourine with the snare so there's a huge wet noise on the snare that isn't the snare. Gently expand (a gate that only reduces output by a few dB, such that when the gate opens there's only a slight volume increase) the tails and decays of pads with the rhythm instruments to extend the feel of the groove into other aspects of the sonic landscape.

Modulate your reverbs. It's amazing how cool a little chorus or phase sounds on reverb, and how people seldom think to do something so simple and effective. In the old days when hardware units were the only option, it was hard to sacrifice something like a rackmount flanger to a reverb, but nowadays, just throw a plug-in on it. Just experiment. Like a lot of effects, modulated reverb is best used sparingly, to heighten a specific moment of a song, rather than having it on all the time. But rules and suggestions are made for breaking and ignoring, so feel free to slop modulation all over the place, but perhaps control it with ducking? Modulated reverb on strings, keyboard pads and chorussy vocals can add an otherworldly effect to things, and you can reign it in using keying and automation.

Goof Around in Fadeouts. Good fadeouts are an art form. I love fadeouts that have a little something in them to catch your ear and pull your attention back into the song. An amazing, fast guitar run, a spectacular vocal moment, someone talking, etc. Doing wacky things with the reverb in a fadeout is always fun. Crank the reverbs up so that things sound like they're going farther away as they fade, or dry things up totally so that the fade makes things sound like they're getting smaller. Roll off the bass gradually and pan things tighter to accentuate the smallness.

A last bit of advice: you’ve got more power in your laptop than anyone in the studio biz has ever had. By next year, that will probably double. Put that power to use in the search for something new, different and yours. Experiment and play. Don’t let Ai have all the fun.

 

Happy Monday!

Gah!!! We hoped to have a new plug-in out this week, but it will be released in October. Note to self: don’t announce things unless it’s a sure thing.

There is a ton going on, though, at Korneff: new plug-ins, a bunch of plug-in updates that you’ve been asking for, some new collaborations with some very interesting entities and people, a booth at NAMM... the fun never ends.

Here’s a thing to listen to while you read...

Oh my... Scandinavian folk metal anyone? Would these guys absolutely crush the Cranberries in a fight? Judging by the video, they’d crush just about anyone in a fight.

Onward.

The last two New Mondays have been loosely connected by the math of overtones, or harmonics, and how that applies to equalization and last week, how saturation and distortion fall into this same mathematical black hole.

This is foundationally important stuff, and without a good sense of it, it’s really hard to have a firm grasp on all sorts of things. Understanding this will help you to know why use a limiter here and not there, or add saturation here and not there. Or why mixing in a perfectly in-tune guitar part can suddenly make the whole record sound out of tune.

It’s all about...

Inharmonicity

Ever notice how much a tuner jumps around when you first hit a note? It’s because the initial strike is essentially pitchless. It’s “inharmonic,” which isn’t a real word but inharmonicity is.

I found this video on why bells sound out of tune. It’s not a technical explanation of inharmonicity, but it is a great illustration of it.

Here’s a thing I wrote on inharmonicity. Don’t know this stuff? Read about it.

Intermodulation Distortion

The way equipment and devices, whether analog and tangible or digital, create inharmonicity is through something called Intermodulation Distortion.

It’s your friend, it’s your enemy... typically it’s your enemy. Here’s a video of a guy demonstrating it with a guitar.

Again, I wrote more on it here.

Ai Criminals

The music industry, in general, doesn’t know how to deal with Spotify and streaming services. Good guys? Bad guys? Evil? Necessary evil?

This guy ripped them off for millions and now he’s off to jail. Robin Hood? Jesse James? Michael Smith?

A Drum Trick

Here’s a tuning trick for floor toms, which are always a pain in the head it seems. I haven’t tried it yet, but it does appear to work, and why would someone fake this? It’s not like there’s millions to be made from Spotify with streams of it.

Vault of Marco

Marco strikes again with some very obscure and excellent early 70s soul from Marie “Queen” Lyons. What a fabulous singer. Bizarre mix. The whole thing is mono except for the horn part, which panned right with reverb on the left.

Marie made one record and then vanished into the mist of time.

Have a great week, y’all.

We usually think of harmonics as being pleasant things to hear. They give an instrument its timbre, they provide brightness and clarity.

Don’t know what harmonics are? Go here and read.

Usually the harmonics that our ears like to hear are mathematically related to the fundamental based on whole numbers. Whole numbers: ones and twos and threes. Octaves are a multiple of 2, 4, 8, etc., things like that. Harmonics can be even numbers, but also odd numbers, and harmonics based on 3 or 5 or 7, while they might sound a little wooly, they don’t sound plain old bad. Also, keep in mind that sometimes the math on these things isn’t perfect. It might not be a perfect multiple of 3 but something close, like 2.98, but generally this is good enough.

Inharmonicity

However, there can also be harmonics generated that don’t have any whole number relationship to the fundamental, and these harmonics are usually unpleasant to hear. This is called Inharmonicity — when the harmonics don’t make whole number sense mathematically.

Strike  Tones

On many instruments, inharmonicity happens in the strike or the initial attack of the note. Bowed and reed instruments—violins and flutes, as an example, don’t have inharmonicity because they don’t have a fast transient attack. Brass instruments typically have slower attacks as well.

Fast transient attacks, on the other hand, generate a lot of “inharmonic” stuff—lots of non-whole number overtones. On a piano, the initial strike of the hammer generates a lot of inharmonicity, and that strike is basically pitch-less for a split second. It’s only once the string resonates for a moment that we get a sense of the note. The same thing is true of guitars, bells, and especially drums. That initial strike is basically out of tune, and it is the resonance after the strike that conveys a solid sense of pitch.

The faster the attack, the more inharmonicity is generated in that moment. And, by the way, the transient is typically the brightest moment of a note, because it is so rich with harmonics both good and bad.

Actually, the strike of a note is usually very out of tune! Plug a bass into a tuner and watch how the tuner behaves when you slap a note versus using a softer attack with your finger.

Bells are a great example of the inharmonicity of a strike tone. Listen to Hells Bells by AC/DC and the opening bells are out of tune until they resonate. This has to do with their strike tone. I found a great video that explains this, and while most of you won’t ever record church bells, this is fascinating stuff and it will help get the concept of inharmonicity firmly in your mind.

SO.... instruments have inharmonicity in the attack, the strike. But what about gear? Compressors? Amps? Plug-ins?

Intermodulation Distortion

The way equipment and devices, whether analog or digital, create inharmonicity is through Intermodulation Distortion.

Intermodulation distortion is overtones that are way out mathematically from the fundamental. They typically occur when multiple fundamentals mix together in ways that generate, well... non-whole number math. Harmonics are generated that don’t have whole number relationships to the fundamental. Some of these new harmonics might be undertones that happen below the fundamental, and others above. In some cases the products of intermodulation distortion sound good, but the more complex the sounds get, things get really hairy quickly.

Remember that an instrument, unless it’s like a flute or something with a very simple timbre, already has a lot of overtones to it. A human voice has an incredibly complex series of overtones, so complex that virtually every person has a unique set, which is why we can recognize someone’s voice even if they just clear their throat. So there’s this ton of harmonic activity, then there’s harmonic distortion added to it, and all of those fundamentals AND harmonics have additional harmonics added to them, and then intermodulation distortion kicks in, and ALL those fundamentals AND harmonics AND additional harmonics start negatively reacting with each other adding in yet more harmonics that have bad math going on.

This is the distortion you hear when you crank up guitar amps, or slam things through the mix bus and drive it into clipping.

Here’s a nice, non-technical video on it that makes a lot of sense. You’ll hear why intermodulation distortion can be a huge issue.

Quick Takeaways

Some things to take away from all this.

1. Strike tones are out of tune and bright.
2. Intermodulation Distortion gets worse and more noticeable as the sounds interacting with each other become more complex. It’s hard to get a flute to exhibit any intermodulation distortion. It’s easy to get a full mix to sound awful with even a little intermodulation distortion.

 

 

Reverb has been a studio staple effect since the 1950s, and traditionally, it’s been an expensive proposition. As an acoustic phenomena, reverb is complex and re-creating it required dedicated spaces initially—reverb chambers. Real estate ain’t cheap. Later, mechanical reverb simulators, like plate and spring reverbs were developed, but it was still costly. Digital reverbs started appearing in studios in the 80s, sounding great but again, rather expensive.

In the early 90s, the price barrier was broken and digital reverb units became affordable enough to find homes in smaller studios, home set-ups, and in musicians’ live setups. Soon artists were replicating their live and home studio sounds in the big studio by using these little cheap reverb units.

More expensive digital reverb units used a process called convolution to simulate reverb and other delay effects. Convolution required a lot of processing power, which made for an expensive and large unit.

An innovative designer named Keith Barr, trying to skirt this issue, developed a different means of generating reverb in part inspired by an older analog delay technology called “bucket brigade.”

Picture a bucket of water being handed from one person to another to another to another. That handoff takes a moment of time. The more people on the bucket bridge, the longer it takes the bucket to travel from start to finish.

This is roughly how a bucket brigade circuit works: a signal is passed from location to location within a circuit, or within a chipset. In the case of an analog bucket brigade, the signal quality degrades as it goes from location to location — think of water splashing out of the bucket as it’s passed.

Mr Barr did a similar thing but in the digital realm, using a computational loop. Think of the bucket perhaps being passed in a circle. The result wasn’t necessarily realistic, but it had a unique character, and for certain types of effects it was better sounding than convolution. Most importantly, it could be accomplished using less computational power, which resulted in low-cost, physically smaller devices. Instead of needing a dedicated room or a three-rack space box, you could get high-quality reverb out of a guitar pedal.

Mr Barr’s designs found their way into all sorts of processors and into the hands of musicians and engineers. The sound of many genres, such as Shoegaze and Trance, is built around these little, low-cost reverbs.

Our Micro Digital Reverberator is faithful to the sound of these units if not to the technology. Computational power is now cheap. Our MDR is built from carefully sampled impulse responses taken from our own collection of vintage hardware that we used in our home studios decades ago. It’s an interesting twist of fate that an inexpensive process, created to mimic an expensive process, is now itself being mimicked by the expensive process, which isn’t expensive anymore!

Whatever. The MDR has the sonic character of the original units and the fast, easy interfaces that made working with these things such a snap in the studio.

We use them the way we used them 30 years ago: slapping them onto a send and return, picking out a preset, and moving forward on the session with minimal fuss. Sometimes we’ll swap in something different in the final mix but more often than not, the unprepossessing Micro Digital Reverberator winds up being the reverb we use across the entire project. Fast, simple, and inexpensive has always been a winning formula.

Keith Barr died in 2010 at a relatively young 61. He was an innovator and a pioneer.

A very common technique in the old days was the Mixback. Basically, engineers would print whatever was going through the master bus (the stereo bus) to two open tracks on the 24-track master. Can you believe there was a time when 24-tracks was too many? Actually you can find track sheets from 8-track and 16-track recordings with lots of open tracks.

The mixback tracks were a running record of whatever was in the master bus during the session. They gave the engineer a good-sounding mix just by pushing up two faders.

If you needed to do overdubs, you’d just bring up the two mixback tracks and there was a headphone mix ready to go. Need more of something like the lead vocal? Bring up the lead vocal track a little bit and now the mix has more lead vocal. Need less bass? Piece of cake: reverse the phase on the individual bass track, slide up the fader and the phase cancellation lowers the volume of the bass in the mix! How cool is that? And yes, it really does work!

A better mixback trick: you could “punch in” the mix. If you didn’t have automation, with a mixback you could work on each individual section, punching in and out to do all sorts of difficult mix moves. And if the record company wanted changes to the mix, that was easy to do — add tracks in or lower them using the phase trick.

Automation ended the Mixback, or did it? With a DAW, bouncing rough mixes and then bringing them back into the session is very useful. It makes fixing latency issues a breeze: bring up the mixback mix, mute all the individual tracks and turn off any plugins on the mix bus. You can tweak the mixback by bringing up individual tracks, reversing the phase if you need to lower the volume of something, and then bounce that and bring it back into the session.

With a bit of ingenuity and enough ins and outs on your interface, you can even do a real mixback: route the master bus output to two tracks of the DAW (make sure you mute those tracks to avoid feedback), and then you can punch in and out of your mix just like the good old days. I mix this way all the time, punching the mix in section by section. And because it’s digital, there’s no generational loss or hiss build-up.

This is a running collection of EQing ideas—not so much recipes as quick thoughts on a particular application. Some of the ideas don’t involve EQs but other things, such as oscillators, etc.

All of this, though, comes from thinking about instrument overtones, or harmonics. The pitch/frequency chart, and some knowledge of the math involved in the musicality of sounds, are part of understanding this stuff.

Click on the chart to download it.

The pitch/frequency chart is very useful but you can use your ears and get similar results. Also, digital EQs on DAWs feature frequency response displays so you can visually do a lot of this, but knowing some of the math behind it all will make you that much more dangerous in the studio, whether you’re behind the board or in the box.

The Overtone Series

The overtone series of an instrument determines its timbre, or how it sounds in terms of its frequency response. Most instruments play a sort of invisible, very quiet chord of overtones with each individual note. Simple things like flutes don’t generate a lot of overtones, but instruments like pianos and guitars dump out tons. These overtones are also referred to as harmonics, and the two terms are interchangeable.

A single piano note tends to generate octaves above the root very loudly, the fifth fairly loudly and the third somewhat quieter. In essence, a single piano note plays a major chord.

You can clean things up by notching out lower harmonics, remove harshness by notching high harmonics, or increase clarity by boosting the upper harmonics.

An example of how this might work

Let’s say you’ve got a musical part going from B (123Hz) to a G above it (196Hz). Doubling things, there’s octave gook or whatnot from 250Hz to 400Hz, and then more of that the next octave up— from 500Hz to 800Hz.

There’s also overtones from the fifth. To figure out the fifth, multiply the B (123Hz) by 1.5 to get 184Hz. But if you know some basic music theory, just use the chart. The fifth of B is F# (184Hz), the fifth of the G is D (293Hz), so the range of fifth gunk is from 184Hz to 293Hz, and then there’s the fifth an octave above that at around 370Hz to around 400Hz.

From looking at the numbers, there does appear to be stuff building up in that 300 to 700 range. How often have you done cuts in there to clean things up? Guess why: that’s where a ton of overtones tend to accumulate.

Do the frequency choices on a Neve 1081 EQ make more sense now?

Pass Filter Magic

Using high pass filters, if the song is in A, you can set the frequency at 110Hz and get rid of everything below that, unless there’s a lower E involved, in which case the cut-off frequency is at 82Hz. What if you automated the frequency of the high pass to match up to the lowest note of a chord? Would that clean up the bottom end a lot?

Tune the Drums

Match the toms to specific pitches. Song in D major, crank up a bell-shaped boost at 146Hz, or whatever pitches you want that are part of the D major scale. How about tuning drums specifically to pitches?

Boost up the third to make a drum sound “Major.” Boost up the flat third to make it sound “minor."

Of course, you might try this and it sounds awful because most percussion instruments dump out a huge amount of enharmonic (frequencies not mathematically related to the fundamental).

Delete Resonant Notes

Recording a bass and one note BOOMS and triggers the compressor too much? Look up the note on the chart, notch it with a tight bandwidth at that frequency and then feed that EQ’s output into the compressor.

More Resonance Elimination

Acoustic instruments are designed to resonate. It’s a feature not a bug: the resonance functions as an amplifier. And it works well: compare the volume of an acoustic guitar to a solid body electric that’s not plugged in.

However, mic’d up close, as is typically done in the studio, that resonance can be too much. Remember, it’s designed to make the instrument sound good at a distance, not up close. So, often that resonance needs to be cut back to balance the instrument properly on a close mic. Of course, a lot of this you can do by moving the mic around, but you can also nip it out with an EQ.

I’ve done this mainly with guitars, drums and cabinets, but it works with anything that resonates, including speaker cabinets.

Mute the strings and tap the lower back lightly until you get a resonant “uuuuuu” sort of sound. Figure out the frequency using a mic plugged into an RTA. That resonant area will tend to get picked up by mics and add mud. Cutting in there tends to fix it up. In the old days, we’d cut that out before going to tape. It’s always good to get rid of stuff that you don’t want to deal with as early as possible.

You can bang around on instruments or cabinets or drums or cajons or really anything to figure out where the resonances are at. Cutting around that area almost always cleans things up a bit. I’ve fed white noise through speaker cabinets and looked at the output on an RTA to figure out the resonances.

Notch Not the Fundamental

If a note seems loud and you don’t want to hit the fundamental, notch out the octave and the fifth, or even the fifth above the octave. Note that our Insufferable Midrange Filter on the AIP has something like this happening in it—you can notch the frequency and an octave below and above.

Get Any Note to Feedback

Want a guitar to “hang” with feedback on a particular note, like this? Want to do it with total control and at a low volume so you don’t go deaf?

Get your guitar all set up. On the monitor channel, find the note you want to feedback on the chart and then boost that frequency by 10+ dB with a narrow bandwidth. Switch the EQ to bypass. Hit record. When it comes time to get the note to feedback, pop in the EQ and hear the note SCREAM. Voila - instant feedback. And because you put the EQ on the OUTPUT, you didn’t print any of it to a track, so it just sort of magically happens. And again, you can “tune” the feedback to any note or even a chord by looking it up on the chart.

Taming Drones

Some instruments have a lot of drone activity — bagpipes, sitars, certain keyboard patches, and the most common pain in the head, open-tuned guitars.

Open-tuned guitars drone principally because players come up with parts to take advantage of the open strings, but any part with ringing strings can make things muddy really quickly. So, if the tuning is an open G, there’s going to be a lot of G and D action happening. Narrow cuts at those frequencies can lessen some of the ring and drone. Or, reverse it to bring it out.

Harmonics on Synths

If, in a mix, a synth sound is too present, often one can adjust oscillators that are adding information (harmonics) above the fundamental. Turn that octave down to get the part to sit in there more nicely.

Alternatively, if a low synth part can’t be heard on a small speaker, like an iPhone speaker, and it’s important to hear that part better, increase the oscillator an octave up. Or, use an EQ to boost those frequencies an octave above the fundamental.

Harmonics on Low Kicks

Really low kicks and bass, that are down below 100Hz, probably won’t show up on a small speaker. I guarantee an iPhone doesn’t go down that low. But your ear can hear the overtones of the kick or bass and then “invent” the fundamental. You can help this process along by figuring out the fundamental of the kick and then reinforcing it by boosting two octaves above it.

Complementary Boosts and Cuts

You’ve got a female vocal that’s lost in the mix. You figure out that if you boost it down in the fundamental area, let’s say around 200Hz, and even more in presence region (10x 200 = 2kHz) you can get that vocal to sit there well. But it sounds harsh or somewhat odd because you’re boosting it a lot.

So, rather than using a lot of positive gain, boost it much less and cut other instruments that occupy the same frequency range in those same places, but not by a lot. Just a bit of negative gain. If the voice requires 8dB of gain at 2kHz to be heard, boost it 3dB and then cut whatever else is in there by 5dB at 2kHz. It’s like you’re making frequency puzzle pieces.

More to Come

here

As Dan and I think of things we’ll add it here. And if you have ideas, send them in and we’ll add them to this page, with your name as the contributor.

Happy Monday!

Check it out: our friend Malcom Owen-Flood, who is a wonderful engineer and location sound expert, made a video using our Echoleffe Tape Delay. Have a look, give Malcom some love, etc.

ONWARD and UPWARD into SPACE!

July 20th, 1969, some of us heard this or saw it on TV.

I saw it. I was 6?

In an effort to capitalize on the event, this was released on July 11th, 1969. Listen. Just sit there and listen.

You’ve heard this a million times but it remains a simply stunning recording, like nothing anyone had heard at the time and it still sounds startling and fresh 50+ years later.

It didn’t sell especially well, but it did on subsequent re-releases, and now... it’s one of the great songs and certainly one of the great productions in the rock canon.

Space Oddity was the lead single on Bowie’s second solo album, which was produced by the legendary Tony Visconti. However, Visconti thought Space Oddity was a novelty song, and while he produced the album, he passed this single off to engineer producer Gus Dudgeon.

Dudgeon LOVED the song and he and Bowie planned out its expensive and complex arrangement, which features a rhythm section, a mellotron, a string ensemble, and a wacky little electronic instrument called a Stylophone, which was basically an oscillator controlled by moving a little metal pen (stylus) across an engraved keyboard. The stylophone was on Bowie’s original demo of Space Oddity, and in the finished recording you can hear it behind the 12 guitar - it sounds like an oboe - and more obviously in a descending line here. Bowie played both 12-string and the stylophone, as well as performing all the vocals.

Wayne, Herbie and Terry

I’ve always loved the lead guitar parts on this, played by Mick Wayne. This sound here, and similar moments scattered about the recording, are him screwing around with the tuning of his guitar’s strings — a studio accident. Wayne was tuning and the sound of it hooked both Dudgeon and Bowie by the ear.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an interesting record from this time if Herbie Flowers wasn’t the bassist. His basslines are so fluid and melodic, and typical of his playing, somehow catchy and memorable. This line here at the start of the bridge is so killer, weaving in and out of the vocals and the flutes.

The drummer on Space Oddity is a guy named Terry Cox. He’s clearly a jazz drummer, occasionally keeping a simple beat but often providing more drama and dynamics than just time keeping. He was a member of Pentangle, which was perhaps prog rock before even King Crimson. Pentangle played a mix of traditional English folk music and jazz. Check out the opening drum riff of this live recording. Has anyone sampled this yet? This sounds like the great grandmother of Massive Attack. Or maybe it sounds more like Teardrop, especially in the vocals.

The interplay between guitar, bass and drums, and then vocal, mellotron, and string section, is probably something that could never be programmed or created with AI. Listen to the absolute looseness of this vamp out, and how all the parts weave around each other, especially Herbie and Terry.

Gus Dudgeon

Gus Dudgeon went on to a big career, working with Elton John during his heyday — from 'Madman Across the Water' to 'Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy', and yes, Dudgeon produced 'Goodbye Yellowbrick Road'. He’s also credited with using the first “sample” — a drum loop on this. He worked with XTC, Joan Armatrading, The Beach Boys...

He also produced Mott the Hoople! This is a personal fave, and it has the best 5 note guitar solo anyone ever cut.

Mott does have a Bowie-esque sound. It’s probably because they had broken up when Bowie heard about it, offered to produce an album and give them a song. They took him up on it and got their first hit.

The hit Bowie gave them, All the Young Dudes, is one of those songs everyone has heard but few know the title of. It’s easily one of Bowie’s best songs. And he just gave it away.

So... we leave the glam for a while. Please feel free to write in and toss me ideas about what might happen next on a New Monday.

 

Happy Monday, all

SO... you’ve heard this song a million times, but it’s amazing, so put on your good earbuds or headphones, or listen on your good speakers, or if you’re at your computer and listening on something like iLouds (Dan and I both love our iLouds), put a pillow over your monitor - it tends to clean up imaging - and give this a good listen.

Have a listen here.

The biggest hit from a very polarizing figure in rock.

Can he sing? Meh... I suppose Lou Reed is the patron saint of singers that really can’t sing, but that didn’t stop him.

The studio was Trident, the producer was David Bowie with Mick Ronson, and the engineer was the amazing Ken Scott. He wrote a nice and detailed memory of the recording session that you can read here. I’ll hit upon a few of the main useful things below.

Herbie Rides Again

The incredibly recognizable opening riff on the bass is courtesy of our hero from last week, Herbie Flowers. It’s amazing how two notes with a slur between them can be so catchy. He was called in to lay down an upright bass part, but ever the businessman, and knowing that he’d get paid more for additional tracking, Herbie suggested an overdub: an electric bass part a 10th up. You hear this part on the chorus and on the vamp out.

Do D’do D’do Do d'Do

'The “colored girls” sing the Do d’do' on the chorus were sung by Thunderthighs, and they weren’t 'colored', they were three white English girls who were session singers in London. And they even had their own hit, Central Park Arrest. It’s.. well, have a listen. A lot of fun and way way out there for a pop tune. And that’s the Thunderthighs in the video! I might have to clean this up audio-wise.

It was written by Lynsey De Paul, who was a major solo artist and singer/songwriter in England in the 70s. Touted as “England’s Carol King,” she wrote for herself and others. Here she seems to have written a song for Saturday Night Fever two years before the BeeGees. I found a playlist of all her singles, if you’re looking for things to inspire. There’s a good chance Herbie Flowers is playing bass on a bunch of these.

Back to 'Walk on the Wild Side', there’s a wonderful, easy effect you can steal. When the Do d’do’s first come in, they sound far away, and as the part continues, the Thinderthighs seem to get closer. Do this: use a pre-fader aux send from a vocal channel, feed it to a reverb unit and crank the reverb’s output up. When the channel fader on the vocals is down, the reverb is dominant, and the vocals sound far away and back there. As you push up the vocal’s fader, they’ll seem to get closer. Of course, use this dramatically.

More Lou Reed

Lou is an acquired taste with a very inconsistent output. He phoned it in at many points in his career, but when he got himself together, and often with a great producer, he made some outstanding music.

Berlin - this was his third solo album and it’s the most depressing record ever recorded. It’s also phenomenally good. I discovered it in college, played it every day for months until one afternoon I noticed my roommate, Carl, crying from it. He loved the album but it made him want to kill himself. Produced by Bob Ezrin, 'Berlin' has a rock band kicking ass alongside an orchestra! Check out Caroline Says I. Doesn’t it sound depressing to you? The Kids features children screaming for their mom and an out-of-tune flute at the end.

Rock n Roll Animal - this is one of the great live albums, not so much for Lou Reed, who seems strung out on most of the tracks, but for the band. Good lord, the band is ABSOLUTELY KILLER. This record will make you want to buy a phase pedal. Also the audience applause was from a John Denver concert. Lou Reed would throw up in his grave if he knew that.

Coney Island Baby - a sleeper of an album, produced by Godfrey Diamond. One doesn’t think of Lou Reed as romantic, but this collection of songs written for his girlfriend of the time, Rachel (who was actually transexual), is lovely and quiet. The two were so close they shared clothes, and that love comes across on the title track, and this wonderful love song She’s My Best Friend.

The Blue Mask - this came out in 1981. It’s Lou Reed live in the studio with guitarist Robert Quine, fretless bassist Fernando Saunders, and a great drummer, Doane Perry. One or two takes per song, then a vocal overdub, and next song please. Great album, great recording, great playing. Title track is killer, but the rest of the album unfolds beautifully. Stunning fretless bass all over, and moods ranging from love to murderous drug withdrawal.

This has been a strange rabbit hole to go down... one visit left from this particular slice of space-time before we’re off to something else.

Thank you for the TON of responses to last week’s New Monday. You all are lovely. Have a great week.

The Guys from Korneff

Happy Monday!

Have a listen to this!

I wish I could go back to ten-year-old me listening to the radio when I heard this for the first time. The damn DJ didn’t say the singer’s name, and I misheard the title as “Rocco,” or “Rock Oh."

Of course, the title is "Rock On,” David Essex’s biggest hit, and 51 years later, it's still amazing.

Essex was more successful as an actor than a musician, but he had 19 top 40 singles in England during his career, as well as successful albums. Rock On cracked the Billboard Top 40.

Slapback on the Vox

Rock On started with a demo, which consisted of Essex singing and playing drums on a garbage can as a drum. The engineer on the session put a loud slapback echo on the demo, and that is really the crux of the sound of it, and what makes it so frickin’ distinctive.

But the lead vocal isn’t echoed the entire time. It sometimes splits and hockets from the left channel to the right, sometimes it’s doubled, sometimes there’s a harmony. There’s a wonderful moment where a mass of vocals drop in like Māori warriors performing a Haka. Supercreative use of vocal texture, and keeping the ear’s interest while never losing the thread of the song.

Chordless Arrangement

The vocals have so much breathing room because of the minimalist arrangement of producer Jeff Wayne. Wayne heard the demo and figured out a score for drums and percussion, bass, and a few string players. The music bed is melody lines rather than chords. In fact, the only true chord is the massed vocal.

The classically trained London string players hired for the session were playing too tight and in tune for Wayne and Essex’s taste. They solved the problem by getting them all a little drunk.

Enter Herbie Flowers

Wayne’s arrangement had a rudimentary bass part. Fortunately for the session, the guy they hired was Herbie Flowers.

Herbie Flowers was a top session man in England. He occasionally toured, but touring got in the way of his very busy studio career. By the end of the '70s he stopped counting the number of records he’d tracked on (over 500 at the time). Flowers played double bass (traditional upright string bass), electric bass and tuba, and was equally proficient playing rock, jazz, classical - whatever the session called for. He played bass for Bowie, Elton John, Miles Davis, all the Beatles except John, and tuba on Abbey Road.

Steal These Ideas

Flowers was also a businessman. At the time, session players got more money the more tracks they laid down. Herbie talked Wayne and Essex into letting him put two tracks down, one low and the other high. The result is the incredibly cool bass part on Rock On. It’s the lick that makes the record.

Flowers tuned the low bass down a half step, which resulted in a low-end mess of rumble at the end of each iteration of the riff.

Usually, putting reverb on a bass isn’t a good idea. But with the right arrangement, it can certainly work, and it does on Rock On. The riff Flowers came up with for the overdubbed high bass part, slathered with plate reverb and a hint of delay, sounds like a guitar part. There’s not a guitar to be found on Rock On.

Check This Out

I found this brilliant guy, Chris Eger, who put together what sounds like a note-for-note version of Rock On, with him playing and singing every part. It's a vision of what happened back in 1973 at Advision Studios in London. It’s a deceptively simple song.

Check out his channel. It’s so damn cool!

The Whole Album is Killer

While Rock On is the standout track, the entire Rock On album, which was Essex’s debut, is a sonic adventure. It’s 70s glam, but it’s peppered with horn arrangements that evoke Vaudeville, strange strange vocals, clever arrangements and wonderful production touches. And tons of Herbie Flowers bass lines with a fat sound that manages to be low and articulate at the same time.

There’s a semi-reggae tune called Ocean Girl... I don’t even know where to begin with this track. Is that an early use of vocoder on that vocal on the left channel? And if not, how did they do that effect? There’s something that sounds like a slide guitar flitting around the background, but I think it’s an Ondes Martenot, which is an obscure French electronic instrument, developed in the late 1920s. It sits somewhere between a cello and a theremin. It’s credited on the album. I think it’s lurking on Ocean Girl. What do you think?

Actually, this whole album is really worth a listen. Seriously. Put it on and cop a bunch of great ideas off of it.

Until next week... Rock On!

That was cheesy.

The Guys at Korneff Audio

Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to record a cover of "Karma Police" with the band Pierce the Veil at Signature Sound Studio in San Diego.

As an audio engineer, capturing the perfect drum sound is not only a pivotal part of creating a track that resonates, but it was also one of the highlights of the original song that influenced the overall vibe of the song. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the recording techniques we used to achieve this dynamic and impactful drum sound.

Our session took place in Studio A, renowned for its fully loaded 32-channel API 1608 console and a spacious live room measuring 31′ x 27′ with a 17′ ceiling. The old '80s recording studio aesthetic of faux brick walls and an old parquet floor not only set the mood but also provided the perfect room acoustic properties for this track. Navigating a new room can be a challenge, but with the assistance of award-winning engineer and mixer, Christian Cummings, we were up and running in no time. His knowledge of the room was invaluable, guiding me on the best placement for the drum kit in the live room to exploit its natural reverb and warm characteristics.

The essence of "Karma Police" demanded a layered approach to capturing drum sounds, targeting three types of ambiance: close, mid, and far. I wanted to make sure each part of the drum kit could shine through in the mix, not only providing depth but also a sense of space. A basic assortment of microphones was used for close miking positions. Carefully placed gobos and an area rug helped keep the close mics dry. Instead of close miking the cymbals, I opted for an "overall" drum sound using a pair of Bock 251 overheads. They were placed slightly higher than usual to take advantage of Lonnie's consistent drumming, which practically pre-mixed the drum sound with his performance. For the mid ambiance, Coles 4038 ribbon mics were positioned about six feet in front of the kit in a spaced pair configuration. These microphones offer a smooth, warm sound and have the ability to capture high-frequency detail without harshness. This is what I built the entire drum sound around. All of the close mics needed to reinforce the room mics, especially the Coles. For the expansive room sound needed for the song's explosive ending, Beyer M88 mics were placed about 15 feet back in an XY configuration.

The API console did a wonderful job of making the drums punchy and full, but the overall vibe was missing a little bit of that "magic." I knew exactly what it needed; a little love from the El Juan Limiter. Giving the Coles a healthy dose of limiting, along with input shape set to Punchy, really brought them to life. A nice lift in the bottom end from the Tone Shaping finished it off nicely by adding a satisfying heft to the entire kit. Everyone was like "damn, these drums sound sick". The prototype for Puff Puff mixPass also made an appearance on guitars and bass, but that's for another story.

A lesson I've learned early in my career is to commit your sounds to 'tape' during the recording stage. Why wait until the mixing phase? We printed the room sounds through the El Juan Limiter, ensuring that the drum sound we fell in love with was captured exactly as we wanted, forever.

Recording at Signature Sound with Pierce the Veil was not just about utilizing the studio's top-tier equipment; it was about creating an environment where technology meets creativity to capture a sound that truly stands out. This session was a testament to the power of experience, technique, and a little bit of studio magic.

Revolver changed my life.

I was in either 7th or 8th grade, and I went to a record store to buy a Beatles album. It was also the very first time I would ever buy a record.

I didn’t know much about The Beatles other than any song I heard I liked. One summer I went to day camp at The Thomas School of Horsemanship. Whenever it rained they’d set up chairs in a big barn space and show Help. I think it was the only movie the camp had, and I saw the first 40 minutes of it five times that summer. I loved the in-the-floor bed John Lennon had.

My aunt had two cats named George and Ringo. I knew the other two Beatles were named Paul and John.

And that was the extent of my Beatles knowledge.

And armed with that scant knowledge, I flipped through a bunch of twelve inch 33 1/3 Beatles albums, with their always interesting covers and names. Help. Hard Days Night. Meet the Beatles (in the US it was Meet the Beatles, not With the Beatles). Sgt Peppers. Magical Mystery Tour. The white one. One with no name on it, but a picture of four guys with beards and long hair walking in a neighborhood across the road. And there was this weird one with a mostly white cover and line drawings of the four of them.

I flipped the various albums over and looked at song titles, figuring I’d buy whatever one had the most songs I actually knew. There were crazy titles! Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite! Polyethylene Pam! Dear Prudence! The Word! I didn’t know these songs. There were so many songs I didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine what they all might sound like.

On the mostly white one, with the weird cover drawings, I knew two songs: Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine, so that was the album I bought.

We had a cheap shit stereo at home and a good stereo at home. The cheap shit one was a Panasonic all-in-one with Thruster Speakers… I played the first album I ever bought on the Panasonic in the kids room downstairs in our house.

We all have expectations. I knew Eleanor Rigby and Yellow Submarine, so that was what I expected Revolver to sound like.

Revolver side one song one begins with some noise — some squirps and chatter, and then a voice: “One Two Three…”

Suddenly, a guitar chord slams like someone dropping a metal garbage can lid, a huge bass rolls in and a weird, nasal voice announces, “Let me tell you how it will be…”

“What the fuck is this?” I thought. Taxman. Good god. From there it went all around the planet and into the stars. I’d never heard anything like it.

Side one ended with a short, fireball of a song called She Said She Said. It was the coolest guitar playing I’d ever heard. The drumming — there’s no words for it. It’s perfect and, at the same time, it sounds like someone falling down the stairs. The voice trails off at the end, overlapping and repeating, “I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad, I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad….”

She Said She Said became my official favorite Beatles song. Side one… I flipped the record over and played side two…

There is nothing that can possibly… I mean… how do you even begin to talk about the last song on side 2, the last song on Revolver? How do you talk about Tomorrow Never Knows? It starts with a whine, kick ass drums, and then what sounds like a rampant army of angry lemmings fade in. Throughout it are jags of violins and orchestras, more lemmings, what sounds like a radio message from outer space, that I later discovered was a backwards guitar solo, impenetrable lyrics, a bass that was one note, over and over again, until the whole thing spun apart into a player piano, and a last violin line sucked up into a hole in the sky.

It was like the world sounded different after that song. There’s STILL nothing like it. Tomorrow Never Knows is a singularity. It’s the weirdest catchy beautiful cacophony ever made. Who knows what the hell it is. Heaven, hell, all places in between. Up, down; left, right; in, out.

I had sat there, my chin perched on the back of a couch with my head stuck between the speakers for 35 minutes, and I was exhausted. I laid on the floor and looked at the album jacket, the drawn and collaged front, and the photo of the band on the back.

I knew this was my favorite album, and that that would never change. And I knew… I knew that I wanted to do something that I didn’t have a name for. I wanted to be in a band and play guitar and write songs — I knew all that, but there was something else. I wanted to… be part of something like Revolver. To build something like that. To make records. Records that weren’t just music.

At the top back cover, above the list of songs, there was a sentence I didn’t quite understand. It said, “Recording produced by GEORGE MARTIN.” I didn’t know what it meant, but I was pretty sure it was the job description for me.

I went on to produce records. Revolver was the standard and the inspiration. After my tinnitus ended thoughts of working in music, I went on to direct plays, and again, Revolver was there somehow. Somehow the sense of humor, experimentation, the delight, the oddness, the gorgeousness, the memorability of Revolver is always with me.

After 40+ years, Revolver still clues me into the power of art, the power of music, and what it means to manifest the invisible — to do the work of the artist.

I sort of hate Christmas songs, and I sort of love them, too.

In a lot of ways, Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody is the best of them, though. At least it frickin’ rocks.

Slade were huge hit-makers in the UK and most of the world in the early 1970s, but they didn’t do as well in the US. In the US we know the covers done by Quiet Riot better than we know the original recordings.

In August of 1973, they recorded a song in New York City at The Record Plant that became, in the long term, their biggest hit. And it is one of the songs that started the whole “Christmas Record” trend that we still suffer from today (I’m looking at you Mariah Carey!)

Merry Xmas Everybody continues to get trotted out every December since its release in November of 1973. This season, the old girl is 50 years old and still growing strong. But there’s something else about it that caused me to decide to write about it for you all today.

First, a bit about Slade:

Slade were a goofy bunch. They formed in the mid-60s, went through a number of stylistic changes, before they stumbled upon the sort of “Country Elves from Outer Space With Spelling Problems” glam rock identity that broke them through.

Lots of hits with misspelled titles: Look Wot You Dun, Coz I Luv You, Take Me Bak ‘Ome, Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Cum on Feel the Noize, Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me...

Gimmicky, and not all of the titles were dopey, but the formula worked and Slade in the early 70s was unstoppable. It helped that lead singer Noddy Holder and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Jim Lea were excellent writers, and that the whole band could deliver the musical goods live and in the studio.

Guitarist Dave Hill was a solid player, a natural showman, and continues to rock the single worst haircut in music history. Their drummer was a guy named Don Powell.

 

Accident and Aftermath

On July 4th, 1973, Powell and his fiancée, Angela Morris, were in a severe car accident. Both of them were flung from the vehicle when it hit a stone wall. Powell fractured his skull, broke both ankles, a bunch of ribs, and was in a coma for six days. He came out of it with traumatic brain injuries that plague him to this day. He can remember everything pre-car accident, but his short-term memory is shot full of holes, and he can forget something within minutes of it happening.

Miss Morris fared worse. Only twenty years old, she was killed.

The best therapy for Don Powell was to get working again, which meant re-learning how to play the drums (brain damage sucks) and heading back into the studio with the band.

In the Studio

Pre-accident, Slade in the studio worked fast, dropping songs to tape live in a few takes and then overdubbing a thing or two. It helped that their producer at the time was Chaz Chandler, the guy who discovered Jimi Hendrix and brought him to England. Chandler’s whole idea of making records was get it the hell over with fast and save money. Hendrix evolved into a studio-centric creative and split with Chandler because of this. Chandler found Slade and another payday.

Post-accident, Don Powell could play the old hits, but couldn’t remember new drum parts for more than a few minutes, let alone play an entire song. Post-accident, Slade had to record songs in bits based on what Don Powell could retain in his brain, and then edit the bits together and overdub onto that. This ain’t cut and paste with a DAW: this is sections of 2” tape scattered about the studio, written on with grease pencil, and spliced together with a razor blade and sticky tape. It is a TON of work, and incredibly frustrating.

The first song they did after Don’s accident was during August in 1973, at The Record Plant in a sweltering New York summer, when they recorded a fucking Christmas song. Section by section. As fast as their damaged drummer would let them.

Chords

The basic progression for the verses is I vi iii V, so in G that’s G Em Bm D. That’s not a very common progression in pop, and the Bm to D sort of makes the chorus sound unresolved and “open." It doesn’t end but our ear wants it to. It feels like the song should just keep going and going.

The chorus is very cool: G to Bm to a very cool A# (or a Bb) and back to D. That would be I-iii-#II-V. There are a lot of ways to think about the A# to D, like as a... sharp 5 of 5 substitute. Whatever, it’s cool. Write a song with it.

The chorus ends on a D; the bridge starts on a Dm, which immediately shifts the mood of things and goes well with the slow down in tempo. The bridge serves as a cool-down, but it doesn’t last. It resolves out IV to V (a C to D) and the band rocks out til the end, vamping over that unresolving chorus.

Lyrics

The lyrics... I love these lyrics. The opening verse is sexual innuendos and nods to drinking:

Are you hanging up your stocking on your wall?
It's the time when every Santa has a ball
Does he ride a red-nosed reindeer?
Does a ton-up on his sleigh?
Do the fairies keep him sober for a day?

Ton-up might be a reference to the car accident: it’s English biker gang slang for driving really really fast.

The second verse is down-to-earth and domestic.

Are you waiting for the family to arrive?
Are you sure you got the room to spare inside?
Does your granny always tell ya
That the old songs are the best?
Then she's up and rock 'n' rolling with the rest

But it could also be read that Granny is dead and up in heaven with Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, et al.

The third verse is perhaps childhood memories?

Are you hanging up your stocking on your wall?
Are you hoping that the snow will start to fall?
Do you ride on down the hillside
In a boggy you have made?
When you land upon your head
Then you been slayed

Clever boys - they name-check themselves!

The chorus is wonderful and unabashedly joyous:

So here it is, Merry Christmas
Everybody's having fun
Look to the future now
It's only just begun

That’s every bit as uplifting as I Can See Clearly Now the Rain Has Gone.

The Times

In 1973, England was dealing with an economy going down the loo. The US was still stuck in Vietnam. But the drummer was alive, even if in rehab and mourning, and Slade had a major hit.

Their last major hit. The band’s fortunes changed as the decade wore on. The rise of punk strangled glam, Slade had some hits through the 80’s but eventually broke up, never to return to the original incarnation of the band. There are various versions of Slade still around, fronted by various former members. Dave recently fired Don by email. That really makes me sad. 60 years of friendship gone?

Whatever, whatever. Slade is best at a party, like in the video, shown 50 years ago on Top of the Pops.

Happy holidays, everyone. Look to the future now, it’s only just begun.

I’ve been watching the French-made TV show Lupin, and the song I Can See Clearly Now by Johnny Nash is used in the first bunch of episodes.

I remember when this song came out. I was nine. I had a crummy AM radio that picked up three stations, one of which was WABC in New York City. And they played this song a lot.

I didn’t know music from mudpies at nine, but I Can See Clearly Now was clearly a great song. It had a fabulous hook, a really interesting arrangement, and there was something about it that felt so good.

Johnny Nash was an American singer from Texas. He had some minor hits in the late 1950’s and in the early 60s had his own record label. But, by 1970, his career was pretty much over. He moved down to Jamaica and stumbled into the Reggae scene there. He wound up mentoring a young Bob Marley, and the two co-wrote songs together. Nash loved Reggae, and its mood, rhythms and instrumentation quite literally changed his life.

I Can See Clearly Now was written solely by Johnny Nash and he himself produced the recording at AIR studios in London in 1971. He used a group of studio musicians called The Fabulous Five and probably some other players, but a lot of the details are lost to history.

I Can See Clearly Now is often credited as the first Reggae hit, the song that introduced Reggae to the Western World, blah blah blah. I wouldn’t say it’s Reggae. The rhythm of it is actually straightforward and doesn’t have the offbeat feel that defines Reggae until the choruses, but it certainly has a huge Reggae influence to it and it was a hugely influential record. It was a GIANT hit. It was inescapable on the radio, used in commercials, covered by hundreds of other artists, and more than 50 years later still gets placed in key moments in movies and TV.

It’s a perfect pop tune. And it’s a recording full of surprises. Have a listen:

1971 at AIR... it’s probably a 16 track recording tracked and mixed on a custom Neve console. Typical of the time, there’s no effort to fill up all the tracks. Engineers back then were only five years from doing everything live to 4 track, and that “resourceful” mentality played a big part in recording technique at the time. Why burn a bunch of tracks when we can stick everybody on two, knock through the mix and hit the pub?

Drums and percussion are mono down the center, probably all recorded at once along with bass, piano and what sounds like an accordion. I hear Johnny’s SUBLIME lead vocal, just a touch off to the left, with what sounds like a reverb chamber on it. The loping bass line is just off to the right. On choruses, two harmony vocals come in panned hard left and right, and they’re dead dry. There’s something about the way those harmony tracks pop in and out that makes me think they’re gated—maybe an Allison Research Kepex, which was about the first noise gate on the market. Sounds like Johnny Nash sang all the vocal parts.

Chord-wise, the verse is a rote I-IV-V progression with a bVII thrown in on the chorus. It hints at a key change and this subtly sets up the bridge.

Now, about this bridge... this has got to be one of the greatest bridges in recorded music history. The tonal center shifts down a whole step. Majors are substituted for minors, there’s all sorts of half-step motion, and it’s wonderfully cinematic, like a film score that is minor for scenes of a storm and then breaks into major as the clouds part and the sun comes out. Which is exactly what the lyrics are like at that moment:

Look all around, there's nothin' but blue skies
Look straight ahead, nothin' but blue skies

The vocals in the bridge are phenomenal, like a choir coming out of heaven but, really, I think all they did was crank up the reverb sends. Whatever - great trick. Sounds great.

There are a bunch of overdubs on the bridge. It sounds like horns... No, sounds like a guitar with a fuzz box... No... sounds like early use of synths. AIR had a MOOG at the time and there is some info out there that a synth was overdubbed. I think it's a synth that was overdubbed a bunch. There are parts that sound like saxes, bells, strange fuzzy pads, little squirps and burps. There’s tons to listen to in there. Very impressive for 1971.

Pay particular attention to how the tempo sags on the bridge, which helps with its triumphant feel, and then how the tempo coming out of the bridge is slightly faster than it's been throughout the song. There’s also... a sense of cadence to the drums and percussion, a feeling that the players know the song is coming to an end, and they somehow get that across to the listener. It’s a very hard to describe thing. John Densmore of The Doors is an absolute master of this: put on a Doors recording and you can tell where you are in the song just by the feel of the drums. It’s uncanny.

The song fades on a vamped chorus, with some further synth noodling. So frickin’ great.

It’s a perfect arrangement. So perfect that when singer Jimmy Cliff covered it, and got a major hit, he basically did exactly what Johnny Nash did.

Nash was an incredible singer, with a beautiful, clear voice that was effortlessly expressive. I would DIE to sing like that guy. Sounds like they plopped him down in front of a U67 and he knocked out all the vocals in 20 minutes.

Lyrically, it’s very simple.

I can see clearly now the rain has gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (Bright), bright (Bright)
Sun-shiny day

There are idiots on the internet claiming that Nash wrote the song after having cataract surgery! I say bullshit and I say who cares? The song is clearly about what it is about, and it needs no further interpretation.

You don’t figure out a song as great as this with your head; you figure it out with your heart.

All in all, the perfect song for a wet day in Montreal, where the sun might not shine much for months, and some good coffee and music is what gets you through til there’s nothing but blue skies.

Happy Sunday.

Hi! Another audio thing to read and think about on a lazy Sunday.

Thanks to everyone that wrote me about last week blog post. Much appreciated. Please feel free to shoot me things either on FB or IG, or even right to the website. Ask questions, share your own experiences, tell me I’m stupid and wrong, argue, whatever. It’s all fine and welcome.

We actually, really, truly have a new plugin soon, by the way!

These Sunday things will deal less with the technical aspects of production and more with the creative, artsie fart side of making records and music. That was always my strong point in the studio, anyway.

This morning I was walking around Montreal, and the song “Season of the Witch” by the singer Donovan popped into my head. Maybe it was the temp I was walking at - that is my theory on why songs pop into your head: something about the rhythm in that moment is a trigger.

Season of the Witch was on Donovan’s Sunshine Superman album, which was his best charting effort. One of the first truly psychedelic albums, Sunshine Superman was very influenced by the times and also highly influential on the music coming after it, which included Sgt Peppers by the Beatles and the first Jimi Hendrix record.

There is a lot going on with this deceptively simple song.

 

The Recording

Recorded in the spring of 1966 at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, Season of the Witch is probably a four-track recording, but it could be an eight. Remember, though, at that time it was very common to cut things mostly live and to only use as many tracks as needed, so the recording might effectively be a five or a six-track. It’s got that fun, hard panning of tracks, with nothing recorded in stereo (see last week here). You can hear the parts very clearly, especially on headphones.

Donovan himself starts the song off, playing the very simple progression on a very chunky chinky sounding telecaster. There’s no riff, per se, just the chords played in a very rhythmic way - they sound more like drums than a guitar. And when the drums come in, the hi-hat plays off the guitar wonderfully and there’s a great ticky tappy sort of groove. Listen for it. The song was cut mostly live, with an overdubbed lead vocal and perhaps an additional guitar.

Huge Bass, for 1966

The bass is HUGE, especially for 1966. Huge bass was just starting to become a thing, started by The Beatles in 1964 with songs like Ticket to Ride and I Feel Fine, and of course, then Rain and Paperback Writer. Donovan was friends with the Beatles and probably heard test pressings of Rain before he went to California to record what is one of the first truly psychedelic albums, Sunshine Superman.

The engineers at Columbia at first wouldn’t cut the bass the way producer Mickie Most wanted it — hot to tape and pushing the VU meters over 0dB nominal and “into the red.” They were afraid of breaking equipment. Most had to threaten their jobs (he had a lot of industry clout at the time), and they finally gave in. The resulting sound is compressed and round and fat — it’s a great bass sound and a simple, memorable bass line by a session player named Bobby Ray.

Quick thought on studio procedures back then. Studios were commercial enterprises and run really tightly. Often much of the gear in the studio was built by the people who operated it (hence the term “engineer”) and if something blew up, it could put the studio down for days. There also wasn’t a lot of spare equipment in the studio at that time. If the compressor wasn’t working, that could be one of two or three in the entire complex. Blowing up stuff was a big problem back then.

Let the tempo breathe

Pay attention to the ebb and flow of the tempo. Too many records are cut these days so fucking tight, quantized to death against a click. It’s boring and the song doesn’t “breathe" along with the structure and the lyrics. On this recording, the tempo tracks the journey of the song. Drummer “Fast Eddie” Hot, who was a major studio player at the time, lays back on the verses, starts picking up the tempo on the pre-chorus and pushes through the chorus itself. But note at the end of the chorus: he does a fill and slightly increases the spacing between each snare hit to bring the song back in tempo such that the verse is again laid back. This is something that’s hard to program. Listen for it and you’ll see how well it works. Stewart Copeland does similar things on Police records. In fact, any good band with a good drummer would do such a thing. Eddie Hoh was a monster that no one remembers.

At about 3:15, as the song rolls into the chorus yet again, someone dubbed in a really loose, totally sloppy loud guitar part. It lasts for maybe four measures and then vanishes and never comes back! Did they use an entire track on it??

How to sing when you’re not a great singer

Donovan doesn’t have a particularly powerful or wide-ranging voice, but he uses it well and gets the maximum mileage and character out of it. This is a great vocal. He switches between a clipped, spoken delivery in the verses and into his barely stable upper range on choruses. His voice gets thin and wheezy up there with a very plaintive quality. The desperation and angst in it, especially in the choruses is wonderful. Notice too how he ends every single vocal line slightly differently. Sometimes he cuts off the word “witch" to pop out the CH, and it fits in with the clicks of the guitars. At other times he elides it and makes it longer. The important thing here is he doesn’t strive to make everything the same each time. It's like how Jeff Beck plays: he never does the same thing twice. It's so much more interesting than picking up a part and moving it all over the place using cut and paste. Donovan might have cut the vocal in a take or two and it might have been while he laid down his guitar part. A great vocal doesn’t have to be labored and picked over.

On lyrics

The opening lyric...
When I look out my window
Many sights to see
...was somehow perfect for walking around the neighborhood, passing strangers and people in restaurant windows.

The next lyric...
And when I look in my window
So many different people to be
...interesting. Donovan is setting up an external world/internal world sort of thing. In fact, through the entire song, he’s really singing about himself, but there isn’t a lot of I I I Me Me Me I feel I feel I feel I feel crap to the song. It’s not self-absorbed.

A lot of the imagery is just plain old strange:
You’ve got to pick up every stitch
Two rabbits running in the ditch.
Wheat mix out to make things rich.
You've got to pick up every stitch
The rabbits running in the ditch
Beatniks are out to make it rich
Oh no must be the season of the witch

It does strike me as being just a bunch of stuff that rhymes, which I usually hate, but against the music it works. It’s really about the repeated “Chuh Chuh Chuh” sound of the CH at the end of each phase, and how that fits in with the guitar. Wheat mix... I think this is a reference to Weetabix?

Often, good lyrics don’t have to make a lot of sense. What they have to do is serve as a container into which a person can flow their own ideas. Think of the lyrics as a cup and the emptiness of the cup is what is valuable, really. What good is a cup you can’t drink from? The value is in what you can put into the cup. There’s a lot of space in these lyrics. For me, the song was about walking through the neighborhood and strangers. The reality of what Donovan was up to is entirely different.

Season of the Witch isn’t Halloween season and pumpkin spice: it’s about Donovan looking out of his window in 1966 and seeing drug dealers moving into his neighborhood. Hard drugs starting to infiltrate the rock and folk scenes in England and in the US. Things were moving beyond pot and into heroin and it was ominous to him. It did not bode well. The police started cracking down on any sort of drug offense. Six months after Season of the Witch was released, Donovan himself was busted for marijuana possession and it was in all the papers.

In 1966, getting busted for pot would be the press equivalent these days to being caught naked with a member of Congress. It would be the kind of thing that could cost a musician their career. There were a bunch of drug busts in the mid-60s – Donovan, Keith Richards, John Lennon. Now there are dispensaries all over the place and it’s basically legalized. Times have changed.

In 1966, he’d have been censored by the record company for lyrics like “drug dealers are in my neighborhood” and the album wouldn’t have ever gotten released. So he encoded his ideas, and the fun for us in decoding the lyrics is that we find our own things. That’s how art is supposed to work. Of course today, one can write a song called Wet Ass Pussy. Times have changed.

Remakes and spin-offs

Season of the Witch wasn’t a hit, but it has been remade a number of times, most notably on the album Supersession by organist Al Kooper and guitarist Steve Stills. Some excellent wha wha guitar on this particular remake - tons of things to steal.

And of course, there is a Nick Cage movie that sorta sucks with the same title as the song. Season of the Witch is a fantastic phrase.

Bruce: Maury - I have a great title: Season of the Witch. Whadda ya think?

Maury: I love it! It has potential! I’m seeing... a hot girl turning into an ugly witch!

Bruce: I love it. Subliminal. It’s about marriage.

Maury: Yes! But with swords! Quick! Call Nick Cage’s manager!

So, have a listen on headphones. What ideas can you steal? What do the lyrics pull up for you?

And more:  do you want these things delivered earlier in the morning? Something to read over coffee and a croissant, in keeping with a lazy Sunday?

Have a great week. Hopefully you get your butt into the studio a bit.

I was listening to some records engineered by the late great Al Schmidt. Damn, his stuff sounded great at any stage in his career, regardless of the size of the console or the number of tracks.

While listening, I started pondering how he used stereo and panning and that got me thinking about “stereo” as a concept in the studio.

Very often, stereo really isn’t stereo. You might be listening with two speakers, or a pair of headphones, and things might be panned around and all wide sounding, but the reality is, generally, very few things on a recording are actually true stereo. Instead, they are Point Source Mono.

If you stick a microphone on a guitar cabinet and record it to one track, and then play that track back and pan it, oh, 60% to the left, that isn’t stereo. That’s a panned mono track - Point Source Mono panned to the left off center.

If you take two microphones and stick them way up close to two speakers of a guitar cabinet, record each mic to its own track, and then play those two tracks back... and pan them opposite of each other, one to the left one to the right, that is Point Source Mono with two mono point sources. It might sound wider than using one mic and it might approximate stereo, but it is still panned mono—Point Source Mono.

You can even do the AC/DC guitar recording thang, which is to put one mic down the throat of a speaker on the guitar cabinet and then another a few feet away to catch more of the sound of the cabinet in the room, and then record each to its own track and pan them wide on playback and... STILL Point Source Mono! Sounds great, but it’s not true stereo.

So, when is it actually stereo?

It’s actually stereo when you record something with two microphones set-up as a stereo pair, either using a spaced pair arrangement, a coincident pair arrangement (XY, MS), or a near coincident pair arrangement (ORTF). Set up the mics in proper stereo setup, record each to its own track, play them back panned wide and now you have actual stereo. You can also use a dummy head (binaural) if you have one around.

What about stereo keyboard samples? It has two outputs, you run it through two channels. Stereo or not?

Depends. If the samples were made using a stereo mic’ing setup, then it might be. If the samples were recorded as mono tracks and then electronically panned to give the listener the feel of someone playing a piano from low to high, that is again Point Source Mono.... with 88 little point sources.

Does any of this matter?????

Maybe, maybe not. But it’s always nice to know what you’re doing.

Probably 90% of the time when you’re making records you’re working with Point Source Mono sounds. The overall recording might be a stereo experience, but most of the parts of the recording are panned point source mono sources. I admit that this is a bit like knowing the difference between frying and sauté-ing when you’re cooking, but great chefs know the difference; if you want to be a great chef, you should know the difference.

This is not to say you should walk around the studio saying, “Let us record this in glorious Point Source Mono and then pan it wherever we desire in the final mix.” Let’s not do that. But, let’s know the difference.

And let’s know why point source mono is probably better for most of what you’re doing anyway.

Getting something recorded in true stereo to sound good can be hard, and it might not be that useful.

If you stick a crossed pair of mics in front of a singer, a few inches from their mouth and record that, and then play the tracks back panned wide, the first thing you’re going to notice is that the image of the singer is unstable. If the vocalist moves even a tiny bit while close to a stereo pair of microphones, the image is going to jump from speaker to speaker. That will either be cool if it happens every now and again, or distracting as hell if it happens a lot.

The same thing can happen on any instrument or source you record in stereo if you get the microphones close. Of course, you can tighten up the panning up a bit to minimize the jumping... but then you should have just recorded things in mono, right? I suppose a stereo recording that has been tightened might have more perceived... size? Width? Maybe the recording will make the source sound physically bigger? Maybe. You can try it.

Rather than putting the mics up close, what if you pull them back and record?

Unless you’re dealing with something actually wide, like a string ensemble or a drum kit, most instruments are physically narrow and that is how we hear them: basically as a point source. How wide is an acoustic guitar? Two feet? The “stereo” experience of listening to an acoustic guitar is really a mono experience of the sound coming directly out of the guitar, the position of the guitar relative to the right/left of your ears, and the sound bouncing around the room.

A lot of the sound of stereo is the sound of the room, more so as you get further from the sound source. If you have a shitty sounding room and you stick your stereo pair far enough away to get a stable stereo image, then you’re going to be recording shitty room in stereo. Perhaps go close, go mono and add reverb later in the mix. Getting rid of shitty room on a recording is really hard.

Of course, sometimes shitty room sounds are amazing, so remember... often what is cool is what you like.

Most of the time, when you’re using two or more mics to record an instrument, you’re not doing a stereo recording. You’re trying to capture more of the totality of the instrument, or get a certain effect from it. Recording an acoustic guitar with two mics, one near the bridge, the other near the neck where it meets the body isn’t stereo. It's two point source mono recordings of the same instrument from two separate places. Think of it as a recording of the neck and a recording of the bridge. Pan it wide if you want a huge wide guitar. That might be cool. Might be dumb or distracting. Try it! See what you think.

Ditto for sticking two mics into a piano right over the strings near the hammers, or one mic near the hammers and the other further away over some resonant area of the sound board. This isn’t stereo. And if you pan it wide across the speakers it certainly isn’t a true-to-life stereo listening experience unless you normally stick your head in a piano while people play it. Which is dumb and will destroy your ears. But.... it might be awesome in a recording, to have a huge piano eating the listener's head.

A piano recorded ten feet away with a stereo pair, if you’re in a good room, might sound amazing. It also might get swallowed up by everything else in the mix, and you might have a lot of trouble getting it to sit correctly. Again, most of the stereo component is going to be the sound of the room—the piano itself is sort of “wide mono” when you get ten feet out. In mixes, room sounds tend to get masked quite a bit.

Many people put a spaced pair of microphones over a drum kit—this is a very common recording technique. I would argue that this isn’t really true stereo. You’re recording the left half and the right half of the kit—again, two point source mono recordings from two different locations. If you put a coincident pair above the drum kit, then you’re much closer to getting a true stereo recording of the drumset.

I occasionally recorded drummers using an AKG C-24—which is a stereo tube mic—right over their heads as they played. It sounded A LOT like what they were hearing. However, on the speakers, it wasn’t really all that dramatic. When the drummer went around the toms, you could sense the locations of the toms, but they weren’t pinpointed—nowhere near as much as if you panned individual tom mics. It worked well for jazz sessions, less so for metal. Modern drum recording is a mic on everything, down to individual cymbals, and the top and bottom of snares, toms, three mics on the kick, etc. And in the mix that all gets panned around and reassembled into an aural “picture” of the drums. It’s a stereo experience made up of mono sources.

Al Schmidt was, like most engineers who came up through the 60s and analog tape, a minimalist. One thing that I always get from anything recorded by Al Schmidt: you can’t beat the right mic on the right sound source played by the right player.

Speaking of, have a listen to This Masquerade by George Benson. This recording blew my mind when I first heard it as a little kid. It still does. A lot of point source mono to hear. God, this is sexy stuff.

Back in the day when I was just discovering the magic of creating music, one thing was clear - the recording studio experience was something I couldn’t live without. The shimmer of a guitar that's just been re-strung, perfectly placed drum fills, or that exhilarating rush when you push the faders on the console: It’s what I live for. But here's a truth I've come to realize along the way: it's never just about the tools or the room. It's about that one person, watching, teaching, guiding: The mentor. These are the real rockstars, the unsung heroes in the shadows. Finding the right mentor can be pivotal to your professional growth. Here are five points to think about when seeking your guiding light.

1 - Understanding Your Needs:

As you begin your quest to find the right mentor it's easy to get tunnel vision, zeroing in on learning specific technique or gear. But mentorship's real value extends well beyond pushing buttons and faders. Look at the full range of skills and wisdom a mentor can show you. Beyond their technical expertise, the deeper lessons about the music industry's landscape, the nuances of working with others, and even personal evolution can be just as impactful, if not MORE impactful. Put your whole heart into the process, stay open to new ideas and experiences, and allow mentorship to shed light on both the intricacies of modern gear and the rhythm of the industry at large.

2 - Industry Experience & Relevance:

One often overlooked element, when seeking a mentor, is the advantage of finding someone whose path touches many corners of the industry. Why is this crucial? Because it grants you a multi-layered perspective of the entire music business.  I was fortunate to learn from someone who was a successful A&R transitioning into a producer role. As much as I wanted to learn about sound and gear, it turned into a more important lesson on navigating the balance between artistic creativity and the pressures of the industry. Look beyond the technical skills and find someone whose journey has traveled a broader landscape.

3 - Accessibility & Commitment:

Let's face it, the audio recording world is fast-paced and most industry vets who’d make great mentors are swamped. Most of these people don't have the time to fully commit to every detail of your needs. Real mentorship isn’t just about shadowing someone and hoping they spill their secrets during a chat in the control room. It's about being a sponge, soaking up wisdom from every possible scenario. I remember the times I ran pointless errands or was the unofficial coffee getter. Trust me, I learned a lot doing that seemingly trivial stuff. Being the guy who remembers how someone likes their coffee might just pave your way from errand runner to someone they trust with more significant audio responsibilities.

4 - Hands-On Opportunities:

One of the most invaluable benefits you can seek out is the chance to get hands-on. One of the first hands-on tasks I had at my internship was hitting record on the 2-track analog mixdown deck and then adding leader tape between the mixes. It might sound basic, but those tasks were pivotal. The engineer wasn't testing my technical knowhow but rather my reaction to responsibility and my general trustworthiness. You shouldn't expect to immediately plop down at the SSL in the control room. Those small tasks are the foundation of it all. Whether you're doing simple digital edits, taking care of basic hospitality requests, or learning session flow, these tasks might seem trivial but they're key to the big picture. Over time, your responsibilities will grow.

5 - Networking & Relationships:

“It’s all about who you know” isn’t just a saying. Networking might be just as essential as mastering the console. Building and investing in these relationships can be game-changers. I had the privilege of interning at the renowned Water Music facility in Hoboken, NJ. Every new producer and project that walked through the door was like a fresh mentorship opportunity, giving me the incredible chance to learn alongside industry giants.

But, decades later, the studio landscape has shifted. Those huge facilities which were a networking mecca have become a rarity. Now, more than ever, you need to actively reach out, make connections, attend industry gatherings, and engage in online communities. Remember, every relationship could be the gateway to your next learning experience or even a big break in your career.

Mastering audio recording isn't just about knobs and buttons; it's a journey filled with highs, lows, twists, and turns. Having the right mentor makes all the difference. Beyond teaching the technical side of things, a mentor can give you life lessons, insights into the industry, and introduce you to invaluable contacts. When looking for mentorship, be open and eager, but also keep your expectations realistic.

It's not just about the equipment - it's the experiences, stories, and connections that will truly shape your career.

I’ve had great mentors throughout my life. They’ve all been different and they’ve always fitted perfectly with the lessons I needed to learn or the help that I required. I’ve been truly lucky.

Getting My Ass Kicked

I was a very cocky kid with a voracious ability to read and learn from books, a tremendous memory, great hearing, a big wise ass talkative mouth, and not quite smart enough to know when I was being stupid.

Joel Fink: He was my freshman acting teacher at Purdue University. Toward the end of my first semester, everyone in the class met with Joel in his office to receive our grade and get some guidance on what to do next. I was expecting an A. Joel gave me a B. I remember the conversation really well:

Luke: A B??!! Why a B?

Joel: Because you’re an asshole. You’re always being so funny and clever and making jokes and talking all the time in class. You’re a disruptive pain in the ass. Think about growing up.

Welcome to college in 1982!

Joel totally got his point across. I got an A the next semester and all of them after that. I started to better control my mouth. Joel and I are still friends.

Rick Thomas: Rick is still the head of the Theatre Sound Design program at Purdue. Rick basically invented teaching sound design for theatre, and I was, I suppose, one of his earliest students. He found me my sophomore year and let me loose in recording studios, gave me responsibility, put me in charge of people to force me to develop leadership skills, and a plethora of other gifts that really shaped me. Rick too, kicked my ass. Worse than Joel.

In a nutshell, he caught me and another student lying. We were writing and recording music for a play, and were exhausted and couldn’t complete something that was due the next day - we would be a day late. For some dumb “We’re 21 and our brains aren’t fully formed” reason we told the director a tape deck had broken. I can't stress enough that THERE WAS NO REASON FOR THIS LIE. She wouldn’t have been mad at all.

Of course, Rick ran into her in the hall one morning and small talk turned into “Is the tape deck fixed yet?”

Uh oh...

Later that afternoon I bounced into Rick’s office to say hi to him, because we really were good friends (and still are). And he expressed deep, deep disappointment in me. I can’t remember much of this conversation because the room started spinning, but there were a few key phrases like, “I thought you were honest and better than that.” The killing blow was when he ended his monologue with, “Now get out of my sight you make me sick."

I walked home crying. This remains the worst day of my life. And of course, the show must go on, so I had to apologize to the director (more tears) and see Rick in the theatre and in the recording studio complex and... my dudes, it was fucking torture. But the lesson was really clear: Your integrity is EVERYTHING.

And then, Rick taught me yet another lesson: He let the incident pass. It never came up again. He never reminded me of it. Our friendship remained intact, he remained my mentor.

Saying, “Get out of my sight you make me sick,” is something you should never say. That said, I survived it and grew from it. And I’m glad Rick said it.

Mentor as Cheerleader

I met another very important mentor in my early 20’s. He wasn’t much older than me. We had been in a band together for a brief time when I was fifteen. He was a fantastic songwriter and singer, and was in college! Impressive stuff for a kid.

We reconnected years later. Richard was now a music business attorney. More than that, he became perhaps my biggest supporter. He got me gigs, he introduced me to people. He gave me a 1957 Fender Bandmaster 3x10 combo that his dad found at a garage sale. Most importantly, he was endlessly positive about my abilities and potential. We traveled all over the place, from mixing concerts in Moscow to clubs all over NYC. We missed the first New York appearance of the Smashing Pumpkins because I was bored waiting for them to go on stage and... well, we went to get Chinese food. All my fault. My career went up, and then it went way down, when tinnitus hit me. Sometimes I feel like I let Richard down.

Richard is STILL in my corner, ever endlessly positive, ever endlessly supportive, endlessly my older brother from another mother. And I support him back, because mentorship is a friendship, and as you get older, mentoring flows both ways. Richard still writes and sings, in addition to being a fabulous photographer, and I support him with endless positivity and ideas on how to record things better, gear and plugin recommendations (he does have a fondness for all things Korneff).

It helps also to have a lawyer as a cheerleader. It’s important to seek out people smarter than yourself, with knowledge that complements yours. You don’t need redundancy.

Being Your Own Mentor

I was really unlucky after college in that I didn’t start working in a big studio. I was in bands and I did a lot of home recording, and gradually I started producing records, and since I wasn’t usually at very good studios at this point, I sort of moved the engineer over out of his seat and played with the knobs myself.

This is a lovely turn of events for a 20 something with ambition and a big ego, but there was so, so, so much I had to either teach myself or figure out on my own because no one was really there to show me anything. I spent a lot of time being my own mentor.

I picked up tricks and tips in studios from other engineers, and I stole ideas from everyone, and I experimented and read books and magazines and listened to records for endless hours.

Hopefully, you’ll find this helpful: I bought a big notebook and started writing down everything I learned from books, all my settings from recording sessions, any ideas I saw, my notes on songs I listened to. I wrote in that book (eventually there were 5 of them, I think) and referred back to ideas often. I stamped that info deeply into my head. This became my standard approach to learning anything, and I still do it whenever I want to get good at something new: I buy a notebook and start reading and writing.

Perhaps the smartest thing I did early on in my production career: A friend loaned me a copy of The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewishon. This is a detailed account of literally every recording session The Beatles had from 1962 to 1969: every song, every track recorded, every idea, every session player involved, track sheets, lyric sheets pictures... It’s an amazing book.

I bought every Beatles CD and laid on the floor in front of my speakers, one to the left, one to the right, and I read that book from cover to cover and listened. At this time, Beatles CDs were in stereo, the individual tracks were generally spread hard left and right. I listened to a song until I could hear EVERYTHING mentioned in the book, until I could hear George vs John in the harmonies. I sucked in idea after idea after idea, and when I was done, I had a library in my head. Multiply this by all the other albums I listened to and tore apart. Bowie. Aerosmith. Steely Dan. Nirvana. Alice In Chains. Lou Reed. Elvis Costello. Everything.

I can’t emphasize enough that you can’t make records without HEARING them in a very deep way. Listening to the Beatles so purposefully was about the best education I could have gotten.

Get the Beatles Book Here.

While I’m recommending books:  Bobby Owsinksi's stuff is great.

There’s an interview with Dan in this one: The Mixing Engineers Handbook.

Partnership

In 2019 three big things happened to me.

First thing: I retired from teaching the gifted and talented multidisciplinary arts program that had been my main gig for fifteen years. It was a great gig, but you have to know when it’s time to go. Retirement is like finishing college or moving to a new city. I left looking for a new adventure, not to sit my fat ass in a lawn chair.

Second thing: My mom died in my arms, throwing up in my face. It was a scene from a zombie movie, and I have PTSD from it. The PTSD brought my tinnitus screaming back. I have had tinnitus for nearly 30 years and I learned to live with it and even forget it for the most part but PTSD decided retirement wasn’t adventure enough, and that now I needed a chronic health condition.

“Oh my God,” I think very often, “I am totally out of my mind.” Retirement, thus far, has been the hardest stage of my life.

Third thing: Dan Korneff showed up at my mom’s funeral. I spotted him and his quiet smile while I was delivering the eulogy. I hadn’t seen him in probably five years, and there he was.

A few weeks later Dan and I had breakfast at Thomas’ Ham and Eggery and a few months after that we delivered the baby, the Pawn Shop Comp, into the plug-in world. And here we all are.

25 years before, I gave Dan a push to get him on his way, and my repayment was him pulling me along and lifting me up. Dan is my latest mentor. Heck, Dan reset my friggin’ life.

I’ve heard him say on occasion, “Luke taught me all I know,” which is TOTAL bullshit. I taught him all I know. He knows more than I’ll ever know about audio. And more than that. Dan’s as smart as he is nice, and he’s incredibly nice.

And patient. He’s been nothing but patient with me. When weird shit happens at Korneff — like e-mail screw-ups, etc. — that's usually me. And he’s been patient with me when my tinnitus has the upper hand.

But at our age, mentorship has become partnership. We both look for the best in the other. We both cover the other’s ass. We each respect the other’s skills and strengths, and we let each other have our individual flaws without judgment. And most importantly, we nudge each other towards being better people. That might be the most important thing of all.

So, those are my thoughts. Find someone to help you address your faults (kick your ass) and someone to be your cheerleader. Learn to be your own mentor and teacher because you’ll be stuck with yourself forever. Find people who focus on what’s great about you, not what is problematic about you. Find people that forgive you.

Find great people. Find people who know more than you. If you’re the smartest person you know then you don’t know enough people.

Find people you can talk to and you can listen to.

Give of yourself. Share what you know. You’ll be paid back when you least expect it but when you most need it.

Never stop learning.

I'll never forget the first person who took me under their wing when I started college.

Making the long trek from New Jersey, I found myself in a situation I was entirely inexperienced in—the traffic chaos of Long Island. Hours after the college had closed - I was trying to enroll and didn't realize the school had different hours before the semester started - I arrived to find a janitor standing outside the main entrance, accordion in hand. This seemingly random encounter was the starting point of a mentorship that would shape my career in the audio industry.

Frank, the janitor, led me into the main recording studio of the college. There was a guy in his early thirties behind a huge SSL 4000 console, working on a mix. He heard me walk in but he barely turned around to look at me. He said, “You wanna come here? Be an audio student? What’s your name?” I said Dan, and he said, "...Dan – hand me one of those patch cables over there." I did. Then he gestured at a chair near his. I sat. This was my introduction to... The Professor.

After intensely focusing on the mix for a few moments, the Professor stood, went to the patch bay and started replugging patch cables like an octopus. He glanced at me: “Turn down the master fader.”

I had a home studio. I knew something about consoles. This wasn't my first rodeo. But I got up and stared blankly at the SSL because I had no idea where the master fader was. He saw I was struggling so he pointed and said, "It's in the center of the console. Nope, not there. Over, down, left, right. Yes, right there. Pull that fader down." Once he was done patching gear he pointed to the seat again and said, "Sit."

At this point I noticed that he had a little dog with him. Cute little thing. The dog climbed out from under the console, walked over next to me, sniffed... and took a shit on the floor. The professor looked at the dog, then looked at me and said, "Are you gonna clean that up or what?" So I grabbed a tissue and picked up the turd. And then I went to find the janitor to get some cleaning supplies.

After the floor was done, the professor asked me if I knew what a Sony DASH was, which I didn't. He pointed to the tape machine in the corner and said, "It's that big thing right there, and this is the remote for it. Every time I stick my finger in the air, I want you to rewind to the beginning and hit play." So I did.

The first semester of school started about a week after that. And I wasn't more than 20 minutes into my first class of the day, when that audio Professor popped his head into the class, looked at me and gestured me out to the hallway. He said, "Dan! Let's go to the studio. We have a session." And that was it.

That was the beginning of a mentorship that taught me some of the most valuable information I know about audio recording. Although my initial encounter with my mentor was far from conventional, I was thrust into situations where I had to adapt and learn on the spot. This experience taught me humility and the value of being open to unexpected opportunities, no matter how unusual they may seem.

Over the next couple years, we spent a lot of time together working on his sessions at the school and at outside studios. The guy was busy. He showed me the ins and outs of working on a session from the ground up. He told me what to do, how to do it and why we did it. And this was everything from how to coil a cable to the appropriate way to label a DAT tape to dealing with musicians. And he wouldn't be shy about telling me what I did wrong... for hours and hours. I think he enjoyed it. And it wasn't without reason. He wanted to make sure that I didn't repeat any of those mistakes in the future, or repeat his mistakes.

One thing I really appreciated about The Professor was his ability to relate technically advanced concepts using normal, everyday examples. For instance, when he was explaining what RMS meant, he used a light switch as an analogy. He said the RMS value of the signal can be thought of as the voltage that would produce the same average brightness of a flickering light. So if you'd adjust the voltage to match the brightness produced by the flickering, you'd have an equivalent representation of the steady voltage. It was analogies like that that really helped me grasp these complex ideas.

Another aspect of his wisdom, that I held in high regard, was his consistent emphasis on the idea that music and recording is a form of art. You're creating art with sound. It's not always 100% technical. There's feeling and mood and all sorts of things that have nothing to do with compressors or equalizers.

During one session, he informed me he was going to be a little bit late and I should start without him. So we were recording two acoustic guitars and a vocal, and I had thought that it was a good idea to have them separated for bleed purposes; they were pretty far away from each other. I wanted complete isolation on their microphones, as far as vocals and guitars go, as well as between the two players. So they were set kind of far apart with headphones on. Everything was going smoothly as far as I could tell.

The Professor finally made it to the session and he sat back and listened to what we had. He then commented that there was no vibe—these players couldn't connect with each other very well. They weren't playing off of each other and it was affecting the performance. “Forget about the isolation, forget about keeping things separate and neat and perfect. Put these two guys together and let them play together. Fuck the bleed.”

And he was right on the money. Being able to interact with each other in a comfortable manner affected their mood and the physical closeness allowed them to play off of each other, creating an intimate and special performance. This experience exemplified his belief that, while technical aspects are vital, they are mere tools; the soul of music is crafted through emotions, mood, and ambiance. His insistence on focusing on the feel, not just the gear and technical aspects, taught me that exceptional audio recordings capture emotions and stories on a profound level.

After a couple of years in school, it dawned on The Professor that I had to start my own career. He set me up with an internship at Water Music, this massive commercial studio in Hoboken, NJ. That recommendation was like getting a backstage pass to a music wonderland.

My schedule during this phase of my life was a total circus act: classes hauling on till 3:00 PM, then hopping onto a train that zipped me to Jersey in an hour and a half. From there, it was straight into the studio grind till the crack of dawn. Rinse, repeat. That was my life for a full year. Sleep was nowhere to be found. This gig was no joke. The initiation? A chunky manual on being an Assistant Engineer. Seriously, it could've doubled as a doorstop. I tackled that monster in just two weeks though, and guess what? I got the golden ticket to the control room.

But let's get real here, it wasn't all rainbows and mixing boards. The initiation didn't involve heroic knob-twisting or epic audio stunts. It was more about plunging toilets, scrubbing dishes, and mopping. These jobs might sound like bottom-tier stuff, but looking back, they were a ticket to character development. They taught me to stay humble, own up to responsibilities, and showed me the ropes – even the less glamorous ones. The Water Music internship was my gateway to a wild, enlightening ride. But let's face it, I wouldn't have nailed it without my mentor's guidance.

He was a treasure trove of sound wisdom, and he didn't hold back in passing on the building blocks of my creative process. But let's save those mind-blowing tips and tricks—like using a gated sine wave generator to pump up the sub-bass, jazzing up snares with a gated white noise generator, and his golden rule of not recording transient material near the time code track—for another blog post, shall we?

In hindsight, this isn't just about my first mentor—it's a tribute to the power of mentorship itself. It's a testament to the unexpected beginnings that lead to profound growth, to the mentors who help us sculpt our paths, and to the value of embracing challenges and learning from them. My journey started with an accordion-playing janitor who let me into a college after hours, and a generous, masterful engineer who immediately put me to work. It took me to where I am today.

Finding the right mentor will completely change the trajectory of your career and life. And who knows, maybe one day you'll start a plug-in company with them.

A few weeks ago I tossed around the concept of Poke and Hang. The more I think about this, the more important it becomes as a fundamental audio concept, especially in mixing, and especially when working with compression and saturation.

This is the video I wish I had made a few weeks ago, when I first trotted out Poke and Hang, because the idea best makes sense in the context of a mix, and masking caused by all the different parts of a mix.

For this video, I’m using pink noise as a stand in for all of the other elements of the mix, and I’m processing a single acoustic guitar track with the Pawn Shop Comp. This lets you focus on hearing what the compressor is doing to the guitar in relation to the pink noise. I think it will make the concept clearer for you.

So, this post is just a video. Minimal jokes and snarkery this week.

Again, thanks for all the supportive email. You guys are great. And thank you for putting up with me as I figure out how to better present myself on video.

We’ve gotten really good feedback on our blogs, and we're glad a lot of you have been finding them helpful.

But in much of the feedback, people ask questions, usually about technical terms or issues. I try to write things such that they are “self-explained,” and you don’t need to google terms, but there are some concepts that require going deeper. And our plug-ins have more possibilities and performance if you understand things going on under the hood, or in the case of our plug-ins, around on the other side.

So, for the next few weeks, I’m going to address some of the these technical concepts in an easy to understand way. There will be some details I'll gloss over, and a few things I’ll simplify, but conceptually, everything I’ll write will be useful and applicable. The technical stuff is important to know and apply - it’s the reason we call ourselves Audio Engineers, because it’s engineering.

LET'S START WITH BIAS

Bias. There are reasons I want to start here, rather than something more elementary like dynamic range or “what is a dB” or some such. If you understand bias, you’ll understand a lot of other concepts, and things like dynamic range and harmonic distortion will actually make more sense when we get to them. And if you understand bias, our plug-ins will make more sense to you, especially since almost all of them have a tweakable bias control on them.

LOTS OF AMPLIFIERS

Analog recording equipment is made up of a bunch of components, things like tubes and transistors and transformers, etc. And digital plug-ins are all simulating the characteristics of those analog components.

Generally, in a piece of analog gear, no matter if it is an EQ or a compressor or a mic preamp, the heart of it, the thing that makes it work, is some sort of amplifier. So, for the rest of this article, when I write amplifier or component, I am NOT referring to a guitar amp, or a mic preamp or a stereo power amp; I'm referring to a little circuit thing stuffed down in all the analog gear you will ever run into. A recording console has literally thousands of amplifiers in it.

Amplifiers in equipment can be based on tubes, or on solid state component like transistors or OP amps, or some sort of combination. Obviously, if you've got a bunch of amplifiers in a device they're going to contribute a lot to the sound and character of the device, which is why tube EQs and compressors sound "tubey" and Neve EQ's sound "Nevey." The amplifiers inside the gear impart a particular sound.

AUDIO CIRCUITS HAVE A SWEET SPOT

Amplifier circuits of any type — tube or solid state — actually don't want to work properly. In some cases they don't want to work at all. They are very particular about the amount of input fed into them, and they can be very particular about power in general. And unless power is handled just right, a component might not work, or work like ass, or work inefficiently and burn out quickly. They have a sweet spot.

If you feed in too little power, you’ll be below the sweet spot, and for a lot of components, they simply won't work, or if they do work they're very quiet, or really noisy. If you feed in too much power, you’ll be above the sweet spot and while the component will work, it might be distorted or otherwise bizarre sounding.

Weird shit happens outside of the sweet spot. It’s like frying eggs. If you set the frying pan’s temperature too low, your eggs are going to be sitting in oil getting all disgusting without getting cooked. Nice. Oily raw eggs. If you have the frying pan crazy hot, when you drop in the egg, the oil will come splattering out, making a mess, burning the egg and your face off (if you decided to lean over the pan like an idiot). The sweet spot of the pan is the right temperature, such that the egg cooks just fast enough that you have control, and you get the egg that you want.

LINEARITY AND NON-LINEARITY

For many amplifiers, the “sweet spot” is when the response of it is LINEAR. You’ve probably heard this term a lot. Basically, when a circuit is linear, the signal that comes out of it is the same as the signal that feeds into it. Now, if it’s an amplifier, the signal coming out might be more powerful (louder), but if the amp is linear, the frequency response of the output closely matches the frequency response of the input. In simplest term, shit sounds the same going in as it does coming out.

If the level of power you feed in is BELOW the sweet spot area, the response is NON-LINEAR, if the device even worked and passed signal. If you go OVER the sweet spot, the response is also non-linear, and what comes out of the component isn’t the same as what went in.

How is the output different if the component is non-linear? Well, there can be a lot of things different about the two signals, from changes in the frequency response to changes in the envelope, but the thing engineers are usually looking at when they want to discuss linear/non-linear is Harmonic Distortion.

We’re going to spend a lot of time on harmonic distortion, but not today. For now, all you need to know is that if a device is behaving in a non-linear manner, harmonic distortion typically increases.

Recap:
Linear: what comes out is the same as what goes in
Non-Linear: what comes out has been changed, and is different from what goes in.

AMPLIFIERS ARE LAZY

Now, here’s the problem, and this is true for many of the components in a piece of audio equipment. They only behave in a linear way across a small range of power. In many cases, this range is TINY. Outside of this range, the component is non-linear. So, the big trick to designing an analog preamp or a compressor, is to make sure all of the different amplifiers are getting a power level that makes them linear, and that level might be different for many of the components involved. Again, if you’re below that tight power range, the component might not even work, and if you’re above it, the component will add distortion.

So, for most amplifiers, there needs to be a BIAS signal added to it, and this makes the amplifier play nice with the audio signal. The type of bias signal can be very different depending on the component, and the circuitry involved can be different, but in general, all bias signals push an amplifier or a component towards efficient, linear performance.

BIAS: THE GUN TO THE HEAD

Bias for some amplifiers or components is basically a gun to the head. As an example, to get an analog tape deck to record, a super high pitched and very powerful bias signal is mixed in with the much weaker audio signal and actually printed to tape. This bias signal is so strong that it forces the magnetic particles on the tape to actually record. Some types of transistor based amplifiers also need to have a bias signal mixed in with the audio input signal, and then the bias signal, which you don’t want to hear, is filtered out.

In this case, bias is like... going to a birthday party place when you're a little kid and you want to go in the Ball Pit or use the Bouncy Castle or something and there's a height requirement, and you're too short. Your head needs to come up to a certain line by the door, and if it doesn't, no Ball Pit for you, you stumpy little bastard.

But, you have special Bias Shoes, that add a few inches to your height (they add power). You put them on, and now you appear tall (powerful) enough to get into the Ball Pit (linear amplifier performance).

BIAS: SETTING A CAR IDLE

Other types of amps use bias differently. In this case, the bias is sort of an efficiency adjustment. A device might work with a wide range of bias settings, but again, there is a sweet spot where it works best.

A way to think of this is to think about a car idle. When your foot is off the gas, with a normal gas powered car, the engine runs but it doesn’t put out so much power that you can’t control the car by just holding down the brake. In fact, if it is set right, you should be able to drive the car, albeit very slowly, just by the brake. If the idle is set too high, when you lift your foot off the brake the car jumps forward. You can set the idle so high that the car can’t be stopped even with the brake slammed down. The idle can also be set so low that the car coughs and stalls, or that when you step on the gas it dies. If you set the idle just right, the car purrs like a kitten, can be controlled by the brake at really low speeds, and when you punch the gas it takes off and there’s plenty of power to drive with.

A bad idle setting is hard on the engine, hard on the transmission, burns more gas and makes the car really hard to drive. Likewise, for some types of amps, like a tube amp, if the tubes are biased correctly the amp is quiet, has plenty of power when you need to rock out, and the tubes have a long life. Set the bias wrong and you’ll burn out tubes, cause excessive distortion, or the output might sound dull and lifeless.

ADJUSTING BIAS

First of all, what you SHOULDN'T do is open up your mic preamp or your vintage tube compressor, locate the trim potentiometer that adjusts bias and then dick around with it. In physical audio gear, bias is generally set at the factory and it's not something the average person should deal with. Now, as gear ages, bias settings can drift, and as they do, the performance of the piece of gear will change. In some cases, the drift might make things sound better, and it other cases, it might make it sound worse.

But with virtual equipment, like Korneff Audio's Talkback Limiter, or Pawn Shop Comp, there's a bias potentiometer that you can adjust. And as you might think, if you turn the bias counterclockwise, the circuit's performance changes one way, and if you turn it the other, it sounds different yet another way.

What you're doing, in analog terms, is adjusting the overall output and linearity of the circuit. With one of our plug-ins, you're adjusting values in a computer algorithm that will change the harmonic distortion characteristics of the signal. Depending on the plug-in and the audio signal you're feeding it, you might even get changes to the envelope of the sound, the attack and release of the compressor, etc.

Dan especially loves tweaking bias on his vintage analog equipment and analog gear he makes. And he wanted to give you guys an experience of what that might be like, and how it might affect audio signals. All without the danger of blowing things up or getting electrocuted. In virtual Korneff Audio World, by all means click the Korneff nameplate, go around back and tweak away.

So that is BIAS. It’s a signal that makes an analog audio device work efficiently and have a linear output. If it's not set right, things will either not work at all or sound distorted or like ass in general.

Bias in a nutshell. Now, go be the damn audio genius I know that you can be.

If you have questions, feel free to post them up on Facebook or use the contact form up top and send us an email.

The masterfader is the most expressive fader on the console. Use it to boost the dynamics of your records and bring drama and excitement to things. Less stupid sex jokes then the first of the series, but a good trick involving tape on the masterfader, and some sneaky ideas.

There’s an art to a great, long fadeout on a song. Here’s a video with a bunch of ideas on what makes a great fadeout, and things you can do to clean up your masterfading... and yes, there are stupid, pseudo-sexual jokes involved.

Tropical Storm Isaias, formerly known as Hurricane Isaias, took out my power and internet for 4 days, hence no blog for last week.

But a few experiences I had last week reminded me of something I've wanted to write to you all about, and this is very business oriented, and not just audio business oriented. Life oriented.

So, I couldn’t start my generator. Tried everything, no luck. I did some googling and found a guy named Peter, from Franklin Square Mower Repair. I called him.

Predictably, he was really busy fixing generators, and didn’t know how soon he could get to mine. And then an hour later he called me and said he was in my neighborhood and would pick the generator up, and that he might be able to fix it by sometime tomorrow, but he was really busy.

He came by, was a super nice fella, we loaded the generator into his truck and off he went.

He called me two hours later. “I fixed it. It was a broken spring in the carburetor diaphragm. I’m dropping it off in 20 minutes.”

He charged me $97. I gave him $125.

Now THAT’S how you run a business. I’m hoping I break something else just so I can pay Peter to fix it. Maybe he fixes vintage AKG D224e microphones I broke 25 years ago?

And that is exactly how you want to run your studio, or your freelance production career, what have you. You want to OVER DELIVER. You want to surprise and delight people by giving them a great experience. You want to make people feel special and well-cared for. Do this, and you’ll stick in a sweet spot in their brains. They will be your fans. If Peter called me and said, “I need help burying a body,” I would reply, “Let me get a shovel and a tarp. Wanna get a beer after?”

On the other side of behavior is my 17 year-old son.

He’s actually a really good kid overall, but there are days when his attitude about helping out around the house is so fucking poisonous that I feel like calling Peter and saying, “Remember that shovel and tarp we hid in your crawl space? Can I pick them up in 20 minutes?"

It isn’t any one thing my son does; it is a combination of a lot of little things. Complaining constantly. Moving really slowly when I ask him to get a tool. Replying sarcastically to just about anything...

Me: We need to pour a concrete slab for the studio air conditioner.

Him: Fun.

Me: We have to cut up these tree branches.

Him: Fun.

He, of course, says, “Fun” in the flattest, most unenthusiastic way possible. If there is a way to make something that is already miserable—cleaning out a flooded basement, perhaps—even more miserable, my son is the man. The Steve Vai of teen bullshit.

Have an attitude like that, and no one will want to work with you. Which is, of course, my son’s point—he’d rather not work. But if you’re an engineer, or a producer, or a musician, you’ll kill your career dead with a shit attitude.

I have worked with a lot of assistants and engineers. The ones who were gung ho, willing to do anything, never complained, and always had a smile, are the ones who have careers. The arrogant ones, who sighed whenever they were asked to coil mic cables, who thought they were better musicians than anyone in the band, who were always on their phones during sessions... they’re not in the audio business anymore. I’ve never met a single world class engineer who wasn’t pleasant to be around. Your experiences might vary, but I stand by my statement.

Your attitude is more important than your abilities. You’re more valuable knowing nothing and having a great attitude then you are knowing everything and being a shit about it.

Remember, all businesses are people businesses. Audio is a people business. If people don’t want to be around you, you won’t be in it.

We hear a lot these days about brands and branding, about “personal brands.” You might have a studio or a business, and you have a logo, and think that’s your brand. It’s not.

Your logo isn’t your brand. A logo is merely a symbol, a trigger.

Your brand is what people think of you, when they think of you. Your logo triggers that thinking.

You want your brand to be what Peter from Franklin Square Mower Repair has going on. Have a great attitude. Overdeliver. Delight people.

Ponder what people think about you and your work. How do you make that thinking even more positive?

Luke
8/12/2020

I was around 14 when I decided that I wanted to produce music. It was because of The Beatles' Revolver album - a cliché but true.

But what's a kid who wants to make records to do in 1977? This is before Porta-Studios, way before iPads with Garage Band. The only multitrack recorder that I might even kind of been able to afford was a TEAC four track, and they were selling for $5000. Ha! That was as much as a car!

I had a Strat knockoff, a portable cassette deck, a cheap Peavy PA system, and some microphones from Radio Shack. My basement was not The Power Station.

But what I did have was a book. I forgot where I bought it - probably a bookshop in Huntington, NY. I bought it in 1978 for maybe $20?

The book was Home Recording for Musicians, by Craig Anderton.

Oh my god! The cover alone made me want to die! I started saving up egg cartons to tape on my walls.

This book... I read it cover to cover in a few days, including a long section on how to build your own mixer, complete with schematics and parts lists. And then I read it again. I read it almost every night before I fell asleep for YEARS.

I learned about Sel-Sync, which made multitrack recording possible. I learned about microphone polar patters and transducers, and direct boxes, and equalization. I read about overdubbing, and effects sends, and reverb and tape echo. Everything.

Home Recording for Musicians showed me how to bounce between two tape decks. I got my grubby little hands on a four input mixer from RadioShack and a bunch of molded patch cables, and me and a friend, a great drummer named Tom, made, what was for me, my first multitrack recording. It was a shitty blues tune but it didn't matter. It was about the possibilities.

And the possibilities were endless. There was the dream of me someday being in a real recording studio instead of my basement, making a record that sounded as wild as Axis: Bold as Love. Working with rock bands. Making music.

This paperback book was like a ticket, a map to my dreams. I kid not.

There was the battle to win with my parents, who were conservative just enough and uninformed just enough to not have any clue about what I wanted to do. It was mostly a battle of attrition - a war of inches until they agreed I could go to school and study music or theatre or something similarly stupid.

My first time in a real recording studio was at college, at Purdue University. It had a TEAC four track and a TEAC mixer, and because I had memorized Home Recording for Musicians, I could work it all from the moment I walked into the control room. I could do things in there that baffled the grad assistants who ran the place, and it was because I had memorized Craig Anderton's book. All the concepts and ideas came spilling out. I was like an idiot savant.

I managed to get myself into professional studios in New York after I got out of college. And I managed to produce and engineer records, and I graduated up from RadioShack mics and mixers to Neumann's and SSL's.

And I got to make a total ass of myself when I met Craig Anderton.

It was at an AES Convention in New York, I think, in the early 90's. I was walking around, checking out the toys, when I spotted his distinctive profile across the room. It was like... seeing God, or one of the Beatles. He wasn't wearing the seizure inducing shirt he wore on the cover of Home Recording for Musicians, but he had the glasses and his sharp features, and he was tall and skinny and every inch the nerd.

I ran up to him, gushing like school girl. "Mr. Anderton, your book changed my life, and blah blah blah and on and on and on...

He looked at a me like I was a maniac, and then he politely but definitively started backing up and away from me. I think he shook my hand. He sure didn't want to talk, and it wasn't the warm fuzzy experience that I think earned after reading that damn book 1000 times.

It's not that he wasn't nice. It's just.. I don't think he was ready for SuperFan. Who would ever be the fan of someone that wrote an audio book??!!!

I was. Didn't matter if he basically ran away from me and hid behind the Yamaha booth. I remain a fan of his, and a fan of that darn book.

I continue to be a reader. I read every audio book I could find for years, even after I was established as an engineer. I read books on classical recording technique, studio memoirs, every audio textbook written, equipment manuals - everything. I devoured Sherman Keene's Practical Techniques for the Recording Engineer: A Streamlined Technique for Speed, Accuracy and Documentation (get this if you can), which was full of ideas and concepts. I learned how to run a session from this book, and also the best phasing/flanging trick imaginable. When The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road years 1962-1970 came out in 1988, I sat down with that book and listened to the albums and songs on CDs until I could hear every nuance and overdub. I think that more than anything taught me how to produce a record.

So, I encourage you all to read. Read manuals, read spec sheets, read biographies, go online and Google up the histories of old recording studios, how great records were made, vintage and long gone equipment. Read about guys like Tom Dowd. Read about how mastering lathes worked. It all applies. There is so much to learn, so much to make you better at what you want to do, so many great ideas to borrow and steal and re-invent.

And I encourage you read before you go to bed. Read before you go to sleep. And let that good stuff you read climb into your dreams. And then wake up and dream into action.

Luke DeLalio 2/25/2020