[00:00:00.610] 

Everybody who wanted to be in the big studio were trying to learn on, like another little Oasis compressor and a terrible microphone. And now they’ve virtually got.

[00:00:16.970] 

Yeah, everybody’s got a studio, which is amazing. But when I was at University, nobody had their own set up. A couple of people had four track sets that they could do stuff on. But you waited for the studio to be available to work in the studio. There was 124 track analogue studio, one eight track analogue studio. And that was it. And when you weren’t in one of those Studios, it’s not like now where it’s like, I’ll go mix it home for 3 hours. It’s incredible how easy it is to gain access to the tools, which also then can be dangerous, because also instead of learning a few tools, really well, you just start collecting every plugin you can possibly find.

[00:01:00.270] 

And then when you go to your plug in menu, you don’t even know where to start. So any approach can have its own pitfalls. But yeah, the resources available now are just incredible. But there are a lot of people who are very nostalgic for the old model, where you could just be in a room and learn from an engineer, because there were 1000 Studios in every city, and you could be an assistant and work under different engineers and producers and learn. And that is an amazing way to learn.

[00:01:29.960] 

But at the same time now, there are millions of videos online, and a lot of them good. And some of them are very specifically how to listen to compression, and you get to hear a single source, different attack and release times, different apologies of compressors. And you say, great, I love fat compressors on Snares now, and I know why I would want a slow attack to get the transient through, as opposed to just like, oh, I’ve seen someone use this compressor on Snare. And then if you get to the point where it doesn’t work on a particular song, you kind of don’t know what to do.

[00:02:07.310] 

So it’s really easy to get a thorough education. But it’s also interesting because I’ve seen this lately where someone will have watched some videos online. And whether the videos are right or not doesn’t even matter. But they get some rules about things about if you like best practises, we don’t even call them rules because rules is ridiculous in something creative, but best practises in terms of level or gain structure, whatever. But they don’t have the complete set of rules. They have a few rules. And so to adhere to those rules, they do crazy things in other parts of their mix.

[00:02:50.130] 

And that’s where I think the problem is trying to get a complete education. And it’s why I actually advocate for going to school for a bit, because at least there’s a curriculum where someone has thought like, here’s all the stuff you should probably know instead of you just cherry picking or not understanding some of the videos you watched earlier on, but you never go back to them. So educating yourself is really hard because there’s no right answer. But I still think it’s really important to sort of chase the basics.

[00:03:24.130] 

There’s a little bit of a myth about all analogue things being better than all digital things. And that’s not a little myth. That’s a gigantic myth, and it is completely a myth. What I think people are chasing is that the only reason digital audio exists is because people saw digital technology and thought, oh, this is a way we can finally overcome all the problems with analogue audio technology, getting rid of a lot of the noise, having perfect copies of things instead of having to always be going down a generation as you bounce tape.

[00:04:00.130] 

The fact that tape itself completely changes what you put on it, because that’s the only way you get it to stick to the tape itself. So there are a lot of reasons why digital technology happen, but then when you take all of that out, you start to realise that, well, okay, but some of that is personality. So harmonic distortion is actually really good, and you don’t want to completely get rid of harmonic distortion because harmonic distortion is fun and it’s EQ for free and it’s compression for free and things like that.

[00:04:34.210] 

So now there’s this push to put it back into the digital processing, which I love because I love things dirty, but I don’t want random out of control dirty again. I now love that I’ve got control over how much dirt. So if I want a cleaning queue, I’ve got a cleaning queue that does exactly what I tell it. If I want a dirty EQ, there it is. So to have both sets of tools is great. But don’t mythologize the analogue era of things. There have been a few projects where not anymore, but one.

[00:05:14.800] 

And I was transitioning where people wanted me to mix on the console, like, we’re going to mix it on the console, right? I said, Well, no, because that’s not what I’m doing now. And I was never hardcore evangelist about it either. I’m not going to say at the moment I would hate to have to mix a record analogue. It’s not as flexible as I like to be. I don’t like working on one song at a time. There are a lot of things about the process that I would not want to deal with again, but I’m not going to say I’ll never do it again because who knows?

[00:05:47.950] 

I used to and then I changed so I could change again. So I’m not going to pretend to know anything in particular. I just know how I like to work right now. And if somebody is going to be bummed out that I’m mixing on an Imac with a pair of speakers and that’s it. Well, the reason that I don’t care about that is because and it’s not my catch phrase and other people say the same thing, and the concept simple. But the only thing that matters is what comes out of the speakers.

[00:06:21.890] 

And nobody who buys that record is going to know or care what it was mixed on. It absolutely doesn’t matter. They will care if the song is great and they feel excited and the mix will be part of their excitement when they listen to the song and connecting to it emotionally. But there is nothing more emotional about an Eve than not an Eve. They’re just two totally different ways to do things. And there are plenty of people who mix who hate old Neves, not hate. Nobody hates an old Neve.

[00:06:57.810] 

They’re awesome, but they would prefer to be on an API or they’d prefer to be on a modern SSL or they’d prefer to be on a modern Eve or whatever. And it doesn’t matter. It’s just whatever gives you the tools to make what you want to hear come out of the speakers. And that for me at the moment, all the tools I need are in my computer. I think it’s really important to get the makeup gain, especially on a bus compressor to where it is actually the same level when you take it out, because otherwise there’s no way to judge it if it’s half a DB louder.

[00:07:35.070] 

Either way, that’s the one you’re going to pick. So it’s that you also you have to just learn to hear compression, just like you have to learn to hear when there’s too much Reverb or when there’s something that’s boomy or it’s all just training your ears to hear things. And every audio process does something, and a lot of them also have artefacts that come along with doing the thing. And the more you use something, the more you immediately recognise the artefacts. So at the beginning, when you’re learning how to mix, you might not realise that the reason something’s happening is because of, let’s say, compression, but ten years in you absolutely know.

[00:08:19.950] 

So you don’t even really think about it. You’re just automatically bringing levels down to hit things the way you want to hit them or up in the threshold or whatever the option is.

[00:08:30.790] 

The mastering wars are over and you won them.

[00:08:35.230] 

Yes.

[00:08:41.390] 

What happened to the lab? This was why are they over?

[00:08:48.210] 

I hear stories about labels wanting things louder to compete on radio. It’s never come up. I’ve never tried to make something loud because of the level ever. I say that as a joke because of the Metallica record, because that one. But we weren’t going after a particular level at all. That was the record we were making, and it’s always just been the record we’re making. So yeah, it’s a joke, but as far as I’m concerned, I was never part of the loudness war. I mix loud. That’s what I do.

[00:09:29.170] 

And the mixes are getting quieter now, but that’s just because taste changes my taste. Other band’s taste. But yeah, anyway, that’s it. I think part of it is we can be geeky. The way loudness is measured keeps changing. So you want to talk about your peak level, your RMS level, and now they talk about long term levels with Luft and things, and it doesn’t really measure anything that’s particularly relevant, because I know records I’ve mixed even recently are above whatever the standard is at the moment with the digital streaming services, and they all have different reference levels, and they all change them whenever they feel like it.

[00:10:18.580] 

So it’s not like you can work towards a standard because there isn’t a standard and they will change it. And most likely they will change it because they’re quieter than the other services. And people complain. So then they will become louder. So to try and adhere to, that is ridiculous. But also, even though knowing that if you measure some of the records I’ve done recently against those standards, that my records are louder, so therefore, they’re being turned down. I’ve never had a band say, hey, our record sounds quiet on Spotify.

[00:10:52.050] 

And if they did, I would be upset about that like that’s. No good. It needs to compete in that when you hear it, it’s exciting, and it won’t be exciting if it sounds much quieter than anything else. And obviously the stuff is being turned down. But nobody’s ever said that. So the units they’re using to measure it aren’t how you perceive things anyway. So I basically ignore all of that. I don’t pay any attention.