Kevin Paul: Welcome to the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast channel with me, Kevin Paul. In this episode, I talk to Emre Ramazanoglu. He's a London based producer, engineer, programmer, writer and session drummer, who has become an authority figure in Atmos mixing, having mixed over 2000 records to date. I talked to him about his early days, sample CDs, Atmos mixing, working with Brian Eno and saying yes to everything. I think it's a wonderful interview that's got lots of tips and advice for budding producers and experienced professionals alike. I hope you enjoy the show.

The first thing I really need to know is how to pronounce your surname.

Emre Ramazanoglu: Oh, Ramazanoglu.

Kevin: Yeah.

Emre: It's like silent, silent g and replace the G with an R and shorten the U.

Kevin: Okay. Well thank God it wasn't, thank God it wasn't complicated.

Emre: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin: It's fine. Anyway, thanks so much for taking the time to do this with me today.

Emre: Pleasure.

Kevin: And thanks for inviting me to your studio, which, you know, for those obviously people can't see, is absolutely packed with super amounts of gear. There's old and new here, it's a wonderful place and you know, God knows how you find anything in this place. But I guess we should really start at the beginning really, of your desire to come into the studio environment. I know you are a musician and I know you've been in bands and we'll talk about that.

Emre: Sure.

Kevin: But I really want to know what brought you into the studio environment?

Emre: Really, I just, when I started playing drums, I started recording at the same time. My mum had like an old Uher like recorder that she'd used. She was a sociologist and she went and went into Africa in the fifties and did a kind of anthropological kind of thing and she took this little tape recorder. So a little tiny little, it must have been, I don't even know if it was quarter inch. It might have been, it might have. I don't even, it seemed to me to be even maybe less anyway, but so I'd just record stuff on that and try and work it out even before I started playing drums. I was doing that and then using two tape recorders, tape decks to record things to one another and one had a mic on it so I could play back something at the speaker and then sort of layer things up really terribly with more noise than you could ever imagine. But it was brilliant. So I was doing that from the beginning. So I'd started to do, I'm just recording all the time from like, when I started drums at about 14, it was probably quite late starting, but did that just recording on something the whole time, whatever I could do.

Kevin: What first got you into the studio?

Emre: I remember in between A levels and no, even I think maybe after GCSEs, I went to Salford where they had some music tech course, right and they did a week recording in this tech course and you could go in the studio and they had tape and we are playing drums mainly and, but they were also recording and messing around in there for a weekend. It was amazing. I loved it more than anything ever.

Kevin: And what the environment with the studio?

Emre: Yeah, absolutely. It was just the best. I had the most fun. We made a track from nothing in the week and learned how to record it and play and hung out. It was really great. It was such a great time. And then that stuck with me. And then I did A levels, I must done after that. It was just mainly playing, doing loads of band stuff and it's trying to record things. I think I was sort of recording stuff. I think I had a four track. I did. I had a four track at home. I was recording. I remember sitting with a kit trying to get a gated snare sound because I didn't know what it was with the drum. So like I really got into making drums sound. The old eighties. Yeah. But I was trying to do that, trying to adjust with the snare with different heads and how long the snares rang for and holding it and dampening it. Fantastic. It was because I didn't know, I thought that was what the drum sounded like. I didn't know anything about recording. And then in the very late eighties, nineties or whatever, there was no information at all. Yes, that's right. Nothing. Imagine no YouTube. There were VHS videos, drum chord. Did DC drum videos. Yeah, but there's no, I didn't see any recording stuff. Like nothing. There was one book called, you'll know it, it's that, that it's like sort of that big.

Yeah. About recording techniques. It's home and studio recording or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But that was it. I think there was nothing else. Yeah. There were a couple of magazines as well, wasn't there? Yeah. Home and studio recording Future Music was the right. Future music. Yeah.

And then Sound On Sound, obviously. Exactly. But there wasn't stuff about really about how to do anything. No, that's right. Much because it was, the way to do it was to buy a multimillion pound studio. Yes. At the end. Yeah. It's really weird because, you know, I'm sure it's the same for you when we started the studio is the only place you could make a record.

Yeah. I mean, nowadays it's the last place you go to make a back. Yeah, right. Exactly. But I, you know, started messing around on full tracks and that all simultaneously until I finished university, did a psychology degree because I didn't want to do a music degree because I'd done a bit of, I did a jazz course in a gap year.

Okay. At, and that was fun, but it wasn't, it made me go, I'm not doing music at university. No way. I'm gonna go in. Just do it. Save some time. So I went and did my, both my parents were academics. It was quite a bit of pressure to do a degree. Did a degree in my, very much in my spare time in my last year, I did 320 gigs or something in my last. Wow.

I was just playing. So you just playing all the time? Playing, playing. Got into the jazz scene there and just got gigs and funded my whole university from playing. And where was that? In Southampton. In Southampton. Okay. I was teaching at age, probably too young to teach. I was teaching in schools, Paraic teaching before I went to university.

And earning, like, at that time, 25 quid an hour, which has a, that's really decent nineties. Yeah. Was like a really quite a lot of money. Definitely so old now in the late 19 hundreds. It was a lot of money. Definitely. So I was going, this is amazing. I'm teaching drums and I didn't wanna stop 'cause having money was amazing.

So I carried on at university. I went to the closest university that I could get into so I could keep teaching and I would do it every Wednesday. I still remember at 13 hour day of teaching and that funded university, paid for everything and then I'd pay for everything else I needed from doing gigs. So I was like a gigging working musician at uni.

That must have given you quite an education in the communicating with people. Absolutely everything. It was a job. Yeah, it's actually a job and you turn up on time, you be awesome and be hilarious and fun to hang around and then you get kicks. I work that out pretty quickly. It's like, be a good laugh, have fun, be cool, participate.

Yeah, get in, make it happen. No excuses. No excuses. And what was your first endeavor like actually, did you ever, did you get a job as an assistant in the studio? No, I went up to London with my friend's older brother who was trying to do a trance label because he was doing stuff, hanging out in Dragonfly records, which is youths kind of trance. Okay. Yeah. Youth label. And so we moved in, I moved my, I moved in with my aunt who bless her let me sleep on her floor on like a kind of couch thing on the floor because she was in Kentish Town and I moved in and just down the road was my mates, my very good friend's, brother's best friend.

And he lived in Ken State. He said, come over, hang out. So I went over and got to hang out with Dave and Julian lived there. And I thought nothing of it because I didn't know anything about this. But Dave was in a band called Sneaker Pimps, who at the time were pretty big and they were getting bigger, bigger.

And I got on really well with him. And he's an absolutely amazing drummer who never gets any credit that I've ever seen. He's totally amazing. He's, it's the most incredible, Phil and hilariously lovely bloke and brilliant. And he got ill in the middle of a tour. And so he said, can you do the tour tomorrow?

So I learned 13 songs overnight. Right. Terrifying. And went to the Sneaker Pimps rehearsal for a day and then went on tour. And that was mega 'cause that was like, okay, well you can do it. So suddenly you were in a band. Well, just playing on tour just for a little bit, doing big stages and everything and that.

And that was, I think that was actually, I've skipped a bit actually, 'cause I'm trying to work out so long ago. He introduced me to Jim Abyss who's a absolutely fantastic producer person, everything. And he was looking for a drummer that could program. Now I come up from Cubase on the Atari. All did.

That's what I knew. Yeah. We all did. And I knew nothing else. And so this is like probably the best thing I've ever done was he said, can you come round Ian on Wednesday, come to my studio and we'll hang out for a day, play a bit, show her some logic you know, logic, right? Yes. No Tater absolutely no logic.

No problem. No, it was on, it was moved to Logic Pro on a Mac. It was Logic four basically at that time. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I know that. And what I did, I didn't know that, but I knew that my mate V knew that. So I said, V, can I come over and learn logic? And he was like, yep. And off I went and spent three days with him showing me how logic works.

I was like, go into the session, I, 'cause I knew sort of ideas about recording, I could work it out. It was sort of all right. And I learned things really quickly. I've got a photographic memory, which is very helpful so I could ba ba get it all in and went and played a bit. And Jim was like, wicked. That's great.

And then let's do some logic. And I just knew more logic than Jim did and he was very nice or didn't notice. I suspect the former, and we got on that Logic four was when they had moved over to the different the cubase of rain screen effectively. Yeah, it was basically that version. It was close enough to what I knew, right?

Yeah. It wasn't like no taste and you could record into the door and you could program And I knew about MIDI really quite well. Yeah. And I'd been doing stuff and it was cool. And before this actually, Dave had intro, Dave sneaker. Dave Westlake, absolutely. One of my, the greatest people around had introduced me to, I dunno. I think he got asked to do this drum and bass band and he couldn't do it 'cause they was doing sneaker period and it was Nina Cherry's backing band doing their own drum bass project. Brilliant. I thought that was my first thing I ever did, going straight in with these heavy, heavy session players.

And I was at least 10 years younger than all of them. Right. Maybe more and annoying and useful. And we, I played and went on my first tour with those guys, went to Stavanger in Norway. It was the first gig and I couldn't believe it was happening. Wow. Martin, let me bring up my drums. Store 'em in the house, managed to do all this stuff.

And then that just spiraled off into, they realized that I, in university with three of my mates, we bought an S3000, which was cripplingly expensive for us. Yes, I remember Then it must have been two grand or something, which is, yeah, my first sample was at S1000, that was two grand. It was so much money and I would, I mean, luckily I've been doing all these gigs and I'd saved and I didn't drink really at that time, didn't do anything.

I got that while on my system in Portsmouth, so I've just been focused on, so focused on, I need to get some stuff together. I need to do this, I need to learn this stuff, and I bought it with my mates and I knew how it worked backwards. Every single bit, everything. Every part of the S3000 I was absolutely occupied.

I'd spent all my time listening to Wu-Tang 36 Chambers and doing the S3000. And so when I got to the stage. They had one and they were running bits of samples off it. And I was like, oh, I know. Over enthusiastic. I know how that works. And they were like, excellent. Moved over to the drum station, that's yours now.

So I'm getting a picture here of a young Emre who is just enjoying, it's the best absorbing everything going on around them. It's the best. It's also terrifying. Relentlessly terrifying. That's what I remember. 'cause not knowing how everything worked or, and having no mates there and no connection with the business whatsoever.

Am I right? You are essentially self-taught, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. If you've not been, you've not done a traditional route. No, no. Not at all. So doing all these things and then on that tour I met a DJ who does fashion shows. And he called, he did call me up and said, I've got a show. Can you come and do it?

I was like, for the show, what? I didn't, that's the information I had. I, no more information. I knew nothing more about it and my answer of course, which I've found to be a very useful answer. Yep. I'm coming. I had no idea what I was doing. So you got a rig and I was like, yeah, I'll bring that. And I think I had a, I bought a Mac at that point at one of those wind tunnel kind of Oh G threes or something?

It was, yeah. The G, yes. Okay. It was like a big massive thing. Age thing. And I've got a oh oh 1, 0 0 1, didn't it? PCIE card. Did you? Yeah because I'd seen the, this is the time right when there was pro tools full stop. People don't really know that now, but you still go to major studios. You see it. It was Pro Tools and it was at that time TDM and that's right.

They were really, really, really expensive. Like this is before Excel. Yes. Before it went to hd. It was so expensive. I remember Cobbling together eventually. This is way after that A TDM system getting cards. 'cause they became less valuable. Cobbling that along. And anyway, this is another story, but so I meant I took that.

Maybe on the bus to his place and set up there. And he said, right, he came here. I didn't know what this was, he didn't have any idea what this was. It was some guy. He was very nice actually. He's become a lifelong client and friend and he's, he one of the originators a big beat actually, and was in Throbbing Grisel.

He is in, yeah. Yeah. Wow. He's mega, he's a me unbelievable guy. And he's, so I've been working with him 25 years now. He's wicked. What? That's a lovely story. He's brilliant. So anyway, but he said, right, mate. Yeah, right. I want a load of wolves at the beginning. And it goes in an instrumental version of this Marilyn Manson track.

Then we need to do a mashup between the Queen of Hearts song from this musical and can't remember what it was. Something else. Maybe over the Mar mansion then. And I was going, oh, right, so this looks like a soundtrack we're building. I didn't know what it was for Still. Yeah, you, I go, what is he? It's a fashion show.

And I was like, oh, right, so it's gonna show. So he's left. And I was like, well. There were loads of sound effects. He hadn't mentioned this, but he had loads of sound effects, CDs. So I found wolves on sound effects. All CDs, no internet CDs. Got 'em in, made a montage of Ws. He comes and goes, yeah, great. Now I need an instrumental version of Marilyn Manson.

I was like, have we got one? And he goes, no. I was like, okay. And then he goes off again. So I was chopping slivers of the track out to make an instrumental version. I said, I've got eight bars. He goes, ah, loads. It's fine. Loop that around. Loop that around for four minutes and then make things over. And it had like a musical version of the queen something.

And then that went on. And then the sound effects we met and I was sort working out as we go along. We're making a kind of like theater show. Yeah. And it was for a fashion, it was for a fashion show soundtrack. So this is sort of like you becoming a writer and a composer. Well, yeah. Getting into building sound design and creating things.

And then he said, write, Alexander McQueen's coming to listen to it now. So, I think we're good. It'd be cool. Right, right. And then I was like, okay, I don't really know much about fashion, but I'd heard of the name and then like five people came in. Yeah, of course. And then I couldn't really tell I was still doing stuff.

Okay. It's to play it. And I didn't twig it. It was him because he's just, that is so good. Just a guy called Lee and that we worked for him until he died, you know, and they were the best thing, some of the best things I've ever been involved with, even though I wasn't necessarily making it. We did everything from writing everything, creating the entire thing, projecting a movie on a wall, a hundred foot wall of mist to making a DJ mix, to making a full theatrical production.

It was absolutely everything with him. It was amazing. He must have learned a lot. Masses of massive stuff. What do you think you learned the most out of that? That time Working under pressure on the side of the stage in the Louvre in a purpose built thing where they've changed the music and the fashion show starts in five minutes.

And so nowadays you'd go, okay, well I'll do the edits and bounce 'em off. No, I will do the edits on a old laptop. Then I will burn a CD and hope it burns. Yes. And then hopefully transfer that to that. 'cause that's how we're playing it back. And hope no one pulls the optical cables out because we haven't got very much space up.

A 30 foot platform with no space to it is like it absolutely meant and terrifying. I remember one of them, there's this famous show he did with chess boards and models on chess boards. Right. And they would say, queen the Knights four. And then the model would move. And I was curing those on two techniques, decks.

So under pressure, nothing in music has been close. Anything like to fashion show. Yeah, I bet. I can imagine. Yeah. Sealander is not mad. It's not a total parody really. I'm not even joking. It's not a total parody. Let's maybe fast forward a little bit Uhhuh and fast forward to you becoming a studio guy.

Where you would've been producing and starting to mix. What's your opinion about being creative in the studio and how to generate that with your clients or with yourself even? It's such a weird journey in really, it's totally weird journey in my career is quite odd because I came in in about 2000, right?

I got into London in 2000 basically, and in 1998 I started coming in. I was still doing teaching and everything, but sort of drifted in. No one knew me, no one really wanted me around. Everything was locked off and the industry was kind of crashing at that point. There wasn't really much session work. Yeah.

I, I know Andy Kerin a bit, who's a wonderful syndrome. Yes, I know Andy Ton. He's absolutely an incredible drummer and an amazing bloke, and he just was lovely to me. He was so lovely and we met him through probably, I think the brother. Of the singer in the band I was doing with, Jim was playing bass with him.

And so he said, do you wanna go meet Andy? I was like, yes. He's like a hero at that point. He's done so much good stuff. And I went to his place. He was set up with this massive kit. He said, go and play a bit. I played a bit nervously. He went, oh yeah, great. Cool, cool. And he goes, you shouldn't do session drumming.

And I was like, oh. He goes, no, no, no. Not for the playing. He says, you can play and you could go and do it. And it's a nightmare. Don't do it. It's a disaster. And especially now, he says, it's awful. I've just done the Spice Girls. I've made more money than I've ever done in my life and I've never wanna play again.

He says, it's just, it's crushed you. It's terrible. And he stopped and he went off and did his own thing, which coincidentally has become crossed over into electronic music. Yeah. And now he's playing for chasing status. 'cause it's exactly what he wants to do. And it's massive mainstream music. But he wasn't then.

So he's killed it. He's amazing. But so great advice. He said, you do all the program, you do all that, do that. Focus on the studio. Do the studio. Do the studio. And I listened to it went. Mr. Person I respect, who knows what he's doing. Yeah. I'm gonna do what you said. And so, basically Jim was drifting away from doing his band that hadn't worked quite the way everyone hoped.

As these major label deals, often don't. He was to go and back to doing normal bands and he was sort of conventional engineer and I wasn't recording at that point, so he was like, I just need an engineer. He was like, just an engineer. You would do all I just basically producing. And the last thing we did together, I sort of did loads of, and he was like, do you mind doing so much?

I was like, no, it's cool. And he wasn't cross or anything. He was just like, you know, I pushed through, I did all the creative stuff and he could see me just doing all programming and all these things. That's not what he really needed. Great at that as well. Of course he can do, he doesn't really need another producer person in the room.

It is totally respected his decision, you know? So he just got an actual engineer who just recorded things to tape what the desk Yeah. And then did the Artie Monkeys record. That's right. So literally that was the next thing he did. After that, Sean Lee came in to one of the fashion show things I was doing that happens to being a fashion show.

And Sean Lee is a multi-instrumentalist, incredible player. Great drummer, great singer, great guitarist. He's one of the guys you get on the session scene if you want someone who's gonna come in and be the sixties to the seventies convincingly in front of you. He's unbelievable. And he could do loads more than that, but he's got the retro thing down.

He's so good. And he said play, he'd done a famous, he'd done the samples series called Planet of the Brakes, I think. Right. And it was really good and really popular at that time. And that's how he got drum breaks from sample C. That's right. Yeah. And he'd done it and I got to play. I said, what can I play you this?

He went, yeah. And he listened. He went, these are amazing. I'm gonna put you right in touch. And unlike other people in the business. He put me in touch. Nothing, no benefit to him. Nothing. He put me in touch when I got a sample CD deal with Zero G. Oh yeah. Who were the guys? Yeah, they were, that was the people.

And they made, I made two sample CDs with them and that changed my life. 'cause I got royalties in from that. And it was more money than I had ever seen in my life. It wasn't loads. It was when I was living on three to four grand a year at that point. Wow. You know, like nothing. Which you could just about do at that point.

It was very, very minimal, tiny amount of income. So I got this big chunk of money and they went, oh my God, that all that's bought me is some time. I didn't buy any gear because I still knew I could use what I had. This is the big thing, right? I didn't buy anything. Normally you'd go, oh, amazing, I can get this thing.

I mean, yeah, I wanted everything, trust me, but I didn't buy anything. I just bought myself some time. Yeah, yeah. I can see you would want everything. Yeah, I went, well, everything has a purpose, right? Yeah. I needed something to do. I've always bought, only ever bought gear. My rule is if it's going to do something for me in the studio that I needed to do, I've got no vanity gear at all.

Nothing like a lovely treat gear at all. I've got 22 channels of 4, 5, 6 tape processing. 'cause I used them all in sessions and you know, it's this kind of thing. So. So how did you end up becoming, well the producer, engineer, mixer? What has happened now, but I'm gonna say the start of that confidently, what's happened is budgets have shrunk.

I'm gonna say that and I'd agree with that. Yeah. And so what that means is the output required is still similar or more, so it doesn't take a great jump to go. Or you have to do more yourself if you're doing anything. So I end up having to do things constantly. My career has been me having to learn a new thing that I didn't wanna have to learn.

I wanted to be a drummer. Yay. Right. I wanna be maybe do some program and not, yeah, cool. I do some program. Oh, and, but we need someone to record. I better learn to record because no one else is here who's gonna record. And if I say yes to the gig, they want someone who can record. So I had to learn that on the gig and then Right.

So who's mixing it then? You are mixing it, right? I dunno how to, yes, yes I will. Until then you have to go and learn to mix and do remixes and then, so we need this mastered and then I'd get something else. Mastering I wasn't happy at all often, most of the time. So I'd go back to my original and that was what would come out most times.

So I ended up mastering everything. Then we'd score mix and came in. Can you mix score at this point? Yeah, I, great. I'll mix a score. At this point you're just saying yes. I'm just saying yes. And then going find the people who know and listening to them. My best advice, anyone says, how do I do this? Find someone who knows what they're doing and listen to them and actually do what they say.

Don't discount what they say. That's not quite fitting in with what you wanna do. Oh, it's really horrendously difficult and you have to learn and think Yes. That's what the rea Yeah, that's what you have to go and do. And that's good advice. Oh, it's gonna take all my time without stopping at any point to do it.

Well, that's what you have to do. And that seems to have borne out by having these large skill sets. And I've got tons of decent credits and all these disciplines and stuff. But I guess my slight secret weapon is I have very recently been diagnosed with A DHD, and I definitely have the hyper focus thing of like, I can just go the entire day and everyone's flaking off around me.

Right. And I'll just keep going nonstop. Like a battering around You're still burning away. Absolutely. Without stopping. And I've done sessions like this where I've had people sleeping under the console and I'm going, BA, ba ba ba, ba. Which isn't always good, incidentally. I, it's not. But it's great for learning.

So this is very early in your studio career then? Yeah. Yeah. All of this has been going on and on. So you've been sort of. Saying yes to everything. Yeah. Learning everything. Yeah. That you could possibly learn absorbing. 'cause otherwise there was no session. Yeah. There's no way in. You've absorbed as much as you can.

Yeah. What I could have done, 'cause I did not have money. This is like, this was a genuine, if you mess up, there's no safe net, you're going back home. Hopefully my safety net was being able to go back to Portsmouth to my parents. Yeah. Of course. With my tail was in my legs, which is, some people don't have that.

So I was very lucky that I could possibly, I'd be, I wouldn't be on the street, but I had no money and so everything I had to earn, I had to pay everything and do everything. So it becomes very, very real then going. Yeah, of course. So maybe I, what I would've maybe done differently is been braver and stuck my feet in with a sound going.

I've got a sound. I know what I like. I'm gonna do these projects. I'm gonna keep releasing 'em. They won't be successful, but people will know I've got a sound and then I'll get hired for my sound, which is the best possible thing. My, my sort of. Ethic, aesthetic and kind of way of working is probably closest to someone like Chad Blake in my mind of what I'd like to be like, where you hire, this is what I'd like to do.

So I haven't done that. I will do what you want to do as my production. So what I was at a mass cast, Chad giving one Real World the other day, and Chad did the one after me. It was brilliant. 'cause he comes up and goes, you know, when I get a record, it's my record. I don't think like that when I get a record.

It's your record as most producers kind of will or mixers. Certainly. I think so. Yeah. It's like, well, I'm working on your record. I'm not, I'm gonna do my thing and make it as best I can, but I'm working on your record. Yeah. I mean, I sort of like, you know, I put my thing onto it. Yeah. But then at some point I say, right guys, yeah, this is your thing.

Steer me in, steer me home. I'd probably be better off ultimately doing my thing. 'cause I have quite a strong feeling and aesthetic and I can do that. And now I get hired for it, but now I'm 25 years in. So it would be nice to have been. I hired a bit before, you know, for doing anything. Sure. But and maybe I would've done a lot better 'cause it's cool.

It worked. I can go in anywhere. The thing nice feeling I have, I'll go in anywhere to anything. I'm comfortable, what do you want me to, and that's all come from the doing. So initial stages Yeah. Where you've said yes to everything and shown an incredible amount of enthusiasm. Yeah. People love, I'm still super enthusiastic now and I think people are surprised sometimes.

I can see that I'm not well enthusiast. I'll come in there. Our session's gonna be a buzz. Yeah. It's gonna be an absolute vibe. Whatever we do, it's gonna be brilliant. Well, I was always taught that what we as engineers or studio people have to remember is for someone who comes in, let's say for someone who comes in the first time ever, this is the most exciting thing they've ever done.

It's amazing. Yeah. Still for me and you know, the first day I've been in the studio was the most exciting thing. It's incredible. And it's really important to maintain that enthusiasm. Yeah. 30 years later. I think, you know, it's hard to maintain. It's like, if you don't have it, maybe stop. Yes, because I still, I don't make any effort maintaining it at all.

Zero. I'm just am enthusiastic. I've recently got to work with Ken Scott a lot. Yeah. And this was the most validating experience of my whole life. 'cause he's an absolute hero. Yeah. He's like, he's a great guy I've worked with. He's so brilliant. And if you hear his multitracks anyone, you just have to stop and think about what you've done the whole life because you put his multitracks up and you go, well that's, there you go.

That's it. It's done. But it's in a way that I've heard lots of times before I, there's something magical about the way he hears is so. Absolutely amazing. And without the lens of a seventies mix. 'cause they're a thing. Right. Or even the later mixes, like just raw. You hear everything that's there and it's insane what you did.

I love them so much. All these classic records. He played me quite a lot of the multitracks with stuff he'd done one day. Wow. And it was just like, I didn't even know he'd done loads of Elton John, which isn't something I really go for, but the recordings are just Absolutely, yeah. They're just an incredible way.

Unbelievable. And what he's got the band to do, not even the technical recording, is like the feeling he's helped everyone get and be the guy to make that happen. It's amazing. Let's talk about the idea of creativity. Yeah. And its application because look, we live in a world where computers can do.

Everything. Absolutely everything. Yeah. You know, and there's sometimes very little thought into actually just, you know, what being original. Yeah. So there's a few different takes on this. I was chatting to someone just the other day about it going I think what actually, Ruben said something recently about it as well, I think, is it him or maybe someone else?

A fantastic talking head was talking about singing. It's something I've been chatting about for a while. Rolling in ai, rolling in automatic mixed tools, rolling all this stuff. Right. What you're trying to do is get to the product as quickly as possible. That's what everyone's trying to do now. So labels are very excited about getting to the product just as quickly as possible.

There are some exceptions and blah, blah, blah. But I would like this music made and delivered, please. Right. But no thought to the process or why that might have been potential or the point of view that you have when you're doing it. Absolutely. Or why you're I just want the product to get on with the, because you get the product done, which has always been a bit of a, some of that, you know.

Certainly more pop stuff. It's like we just have a product. Yeah, absolutely. But now it's, the process is kind of like, oh, I gotta go and do this. Hang on. People are a little bit more, let's just come on, let's just go and do this. Oh, up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's a shame. It was quick in the past as well, but it was very quick.

People do albums in two weeks, including mix. We could do Yeah. Because it was just recording about and playing together about Yeah. But that's not what this is. Now we're sort of, if we are doing just that, that's great, but almost nobody does that. You know? So how, how, what do we do about that? How, how do we approach that?

It's difficult. You have to all be aligned to go, we're just making this record and that's what it is. And you can do things very quickly now. Mm-hmm. And maybe that's not always great. Yeah. That time that you used to have when you rewound a tape. Yeah. So talk about limitations. He's brilliant. He's absolutely brilliant.

I've been lucky enough to work with him quite a bit and do lots and lots of stuff for him. And he constantly talks about limitations as being useful. Do you set any limitations on yourself? I not particularly. I'm quite good at ignoring that problem with process. I just, I'm happy to get an idea going, so I will just always be focused on the idea.

I'm not, I don't care how I'm doing it too much, so that's not so much of an issue. Well, I think there's a lot of value in that though, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of value of actually just creating, yeah. 'cause that's you creating, right? Yeah. I'm just excited about You're working at a hundred miles an hour.

Yeah. Just going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of the analyzing stuff where you can listen back. And you can decide, okay, this, this is good. Yeah. This is not so good. Yeah. So let's explore that. Yeah. And maybe put that to one side that is, I think is what's disappearing. Yeah. Right. That idea. We had it with my, I've recording my band the last two days actually.

Or wherever it was. We're doing completely new direction and it's actually, I developed a plugin with Arturia recently. It's the drum one, right? Yeah. It's called mixed drums, but it's not really, it's more a production tool to be honest. But you can use it just 'cause it says drums on it. You can use it for anything.

Right. You can, yeah. But it's also, it's like a mix thing that doesn't have a compressor or a gate, or really a dedicated EQ in the terms of, you would think of a drum sort of processor, but it's amazing for processing drums. Like it's, I explored it. Oh, it does, exactly. But what also does is, has extremely low latency so I can track through it.

And that is changing everything. 'cause now I can track with a full finished, totally processed drum sound that I can hear and play to and that I've never had before. I can do it with parallels to some degree, but it's hard when you're in a door to get group parallels. Coming back to you in a kind of useful way That's also useful in the control room.

So it, you can do it, it is possible, but it gets convoluted and needs the board to be working really well. And most boards in London don't work. Sorry? They don't, they're just not to that degree of like serviceability efficiency. Yeah. You can't do like I'm doing, like I'll be doing eight parallels and loads of orders.

What are you doing on those parallels? Oh, distortions. And also it's hard to keep them all in phase as well. And this plugin does all of this. So everything is all in phase all the time. It's time aligned always. Everything is using all parts filters at all points to, because I'm doing lots of filtering pre and post filtering and layers of distortion.

I, I'm gonna press you on the drum thing. The eight channels of, alright. Different or whatever it is, transit designers and reverbs. This is all kind of things. So this just does it in one block and I can play through it with zero trouble and change it. So we started a session. I had a total concept of what I want to do.

This is kind of. More hip hop based kind of approach to what we do as a sort of improv jazz band. But it's been done before but I want to do it in a different way. And we did the whole first day and it's very much is creative for getting the sound getting in there end of the day. And I thought, this is absolute shit.

It just doesn't work. The whole concept doesn't work. I dunno if we're gonna be able to do it. Went back quite miserable, woke up in the morning, came and going, no, we weren't playing. So changed everything. Went back in, did it all differently. We cut five tracks that day and it's the best off I've ever done.

Wow. Because changed the whole process bin the whole process, deleted everything I've done. That's not correct. Let's go again. Let's try something. Having faith that we can actually do it and it's. It's much better than I ever thought would be possible. It's quite brave to do that. You gotta, you've gotta just do it because Yeah.

But you, people's thought what, what I used to do is fight through and make something work. I don't do that anymore. Yeah. See, you say you've just got to do it. Yeah. But there's a lot of people that don't. Yeah. A lot of people go, oh, that's not working. I'm gonna go back to some familiar places. Yeah.

That I know. I don't know. The drum loops. Yeah. Certain plugins, certain presets, and they don't push themselves. Yeah. You just gotta, this doesn't work though. I knew you have a lot of faith in yourself today. Done a lot of stuff though. So I kind of at that point, drawing on my experience going, I know this isn't going to work like this.

I could make, it sounded amazing, incidentally. It was, it sounded sonically really good. I was like, wow. Yeah, this is great. This is not right. That's big thing as well. But it wasn't what you wanted. No. It's ultimately why would I, why would anyone do this? This has all been done before. It sounds like a nice, it sounds like a really fat, really nicely played, grew.

But they started overdubbing. Yeah. And as soon as you're doing that, it's like, nah, because this is not what we're doing. This is not enough here. You know, again, a Brian Eno thing, which is very, he's done, he's given me so many lessons in the short amount of actual physical contact I've had with him. Every time there's a contact, I learned some absolutely crushingly, huge life lesson.

And you knows I will read about something. But just reading recently he was talking about, you know, just have as little in the track as possible. Generally is not a rule. Well that Well that's the, that's the Ruben thing, isn't it? Is it? Yeah, but it's, he's not a producer. He is a reducer. Yeah. Reduce, but that's what he was credited.

Early records. Amazing. But that's also because you sit there and go, I don't like that. No, I'm gonna take that out. Yeah. But how much can we take out? And it still sounds in the place we want it to sound because that means the stuff's working. Yeah. Otherwise you're layering stuff on. 'cause it doesn't work.

And I'm really aware of that now. So aware of stuff just. And look we've all had sessions from self-produced artists. Yeah. Where whereas more, more, more, more, more. And you're like, you know, I've got 15 guitars here. Okay. So let me just take 13 of them out. Yeah. And then the artist goes, well, how did you get it to sound so big?

Yeah. Well, I took 'em all out. Everything. They go, what? Yeah. But I really liked them. I had plenty hours playing them. Yeah. Did you? I was like, yeah, great. But it sounds good with just two. Yeah. You know, and that's a really, I think that's a consequence of modern recording. Yeah. And I think it's also a consequence of not having faith in the music. Yeah. I'm really happy with drum liking now I think I'm listening back to some of it going, I've got two mics up. And everyone goes, oh, you know, you can record with two mics. It's great. Which, it's obviously not often it can be, but you go. I'm happy with that. And it sounds absolutely massive.

What some of the best records we've heard of too much. Yeah. They're often not modern, massive though. Yeah. But they can be. Yeah, you can. They just aren't mixed like that. But they actually can be. We've got enough plugins Right. And enough technology to make. It's incredible. Now things sound as big or small as we want really.

It's amazing now, but what strikes me as different is the idea that more is always more and is always better. And I mean, for me personally I'm very similar to what you've been saying, which is, okay, what can we, how much can we get rid of? Yeah. And still feel Yeah. That energy. Yeah.

Or can we, or even better, what can we take out to focus the energy on what's important? I'll start thinking that if I listen to something and question it, that's the first thing I'll look at. Yes. Pretty much. If I'm not questioning it, I won't even think about it. Like often when I put a mix up and the production's amazing.

This is a terrible admission, right? Yeah. If the corruption is amazing, I'm listening to the mix and it's something good, I might not even work out what the tracks are. I think that's an admission. I think that's a sign of understanding. I might be more and appreciating music. Right. More global on the whole mix even.

And it becomes more like, okay, listening back going well mate, I've put up loads of mixes from really good pop stuff generally, and gone, I dunno what I'm gonna do. This sounds amazing. And then two hours in I'll ab them and it'll be dramatically better. And you go, okay, well wicked, we're getting there. Or, and you go, wow.

It's like those two better, sometimes at the end it's a 5% like better. But you, it's, that's, but that's why you get paid to be bucks. Yeah. The one they one to give you the 5%, you know? Yeah. That's what we're looking for. Right, exactly. That's difference. That 5% that can take longer than you think.

But yeah. And other things I'll just go, I just listen for the, that's the thing, what people say, gimme some mixing tips. And I'm like, cool. Give you really good mixing tip right now. Go turn off your computer. And he go and listen. For a year. Don't do any mixing. Yeah, because if you, it's such a boring, isn't it?

It's not the kids, it's the ears. But it is totally. It's totally Well look. Well, you know, if you've been listening to music from anything, what, 2000 onwards? Yeah. Yeah. They didn't have computers. No. It was turn the screen off. Yeah. And it sounds different straight away. Yeah. There's a big visual. Put me in the room with you.

It sounds different. Straight away. So this screen is Raven. I've replaced my old Apple cinema screen with this and working while I was working on a mix, and this is really hard. It's got a really hard kind of, however, the finishing, I'm not very good with visual how visual stuff works. But basically how the resolution comes out is.

It's hard and sort of not cinematic. And the Apple screen is a softer, beautiful kind of finish. And my mix sounded different. You think that makes a difference? My mix sounded different as soon as I put it back up again, I was like, oh, come on, brain. That's just, it's exactly the same mix. The colors were a bit harder on here.

It wasn't as soft and beautiful as the Apple screen. And I could do it because it took me one minute to sort the screen over. I was like, this is hilarious. You do realize that you've actually, now, when people listen to this, yeah, they're gonna be going, oh my God. I know, you know, I've, I'm using this monitor.

'cause it sounds, 'cause the music sounds better. I know. It's absolutely insane. Yeah. So I got over that. And close your eyes and you listen, but there's a thing that's a weird thing on YouTube. You can find it. There's a little kid's toy. There's loads of it and it either says green Needle or Brain Brainstorm, or Green Needle.

Right. And you pull it and he goes, brainstorm. Brainstorm. It's one of those kids' toys you, you have a little windup. Pull it like the action man had. Yeah. And they say something except it doesn't, it just says the same thing. And whatever you are expecting, it says, and that should ruin the heads of any mix Engineers, I've heard that the first thing you say is the thing that you believe.

Yeah. Like the McGirk effect as well. It's like this is a disaster, but it's great if you know it's happening. 'cause then you can go, you know like when you go in a pool tech and you're turning up 10 K and going, oh thank God that's so much better. And it's off. But you've heard it get brighter. Everyone's done that.

Yeah, everyone's done that at least once. But you've gotta think about that all the way through your mixing. It's like, yeah. So this is the best, you know, thing, which I will share, which was, I don't, hopefully he wouldn't mind. I've mentioned it a few times, but we were, he has this thing where he can, it's called the Archive Shuffler and it puts three tracks against each other and it's absolutely incredible thing that he does.

And he's this big folder of music and it plays him against each other. Amazing. 'cause every time he does it, it's amazing. It's amazing. Just three whole bits of music. Okay. Playing each other in a loop from his, on top of each other. Yeah, top of each other. Okay. It's always amazing. And it's got everything he's ever done in a folder and just puts him against you.

It's so incredible to have this body of work, and it could only work with him, I'm sure, but he does it. And an amazing bit of music comes out and you go, sounds great. He goes, that's great. And does it again. And another amazing bit of music coming out. And they're all just playing at each other and they're all random.

All random. And then he said, I'll swap one. And he swap one. And it sounded terrible. And I was like, he went, oh no, there's a lesson here. And I was like, okay. And didn't say anymore. We just chatted. After 10 minutes of chatting, I went, oh, hang on. It sounds great. And he goes, yeah, we just weren't used to it.

And I went bombshell going, oh my God. So now I give things more time. Yeah. Well, it's not when you change something, every artist, when you change something, almost always they go, oh, that will be done. And now he's just, let's live with it for a bit. Live with it for a bit. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. I, you know, when I'm doing, obviously we always do remote mixing.

Yeah. Always doing remote mixing. And you, you'll send something to someone and they'll go, oh, it's sounded really good, but I'm, you know, I didn't like X. And you'll go, well, look, why don't we just live with it for a day or two? You know, or they don't like the mix even. Yeah. Yeah. Some people come back and say, oh, I don't like the mix.

And say, okay, well, let's live with it for a couple of days, and if you don't like it in a couple of days, then we can change some stuff. But if you live with it, generally you get used to it and you, you'll identify things and go, actually, I did like it, but, or actually, it's actually much. It's okay.

It's good. Let's talk about Ena. Oh yeah. Let's talk about Brian. How did you get involved with him? So, I've known Leo Abrahams for a long time now. He's a guitarist. He does a lot of stuff with him. Yeah. And I'd just done. John Hopkins record, he was obviously a long term co collaborator with Brian.

Yes. And he'd come in, I think to Universal looking to get an Atmos mix done. And my dear friend in Universal, who is an incredible person and is such an amazing force for reversible video, generally said, do it with him. Do it with him. And so he sent me two tracks of stems and I did a very, really did a lot of work making a beautiful, completely respectful, immersive version of the stereo.

So when it's on headphones, it sounded exactly like the same balance as the stereo. It was all the same feeling. The mixing atmosphere was the same feeling, but really immersive and interesting. 'cause it thought, I'm gonna push it 'cause it's him. And I sent them off terrified. And she called back going, right, what are you doing now?

And I went, I've just finished something and people have just left. Why? And she said. Brian wants to come over. Is that okay? And I'm like going, yes, that's fine. I think he's absolutely amazing before he met him and all the stuff he's done. Of course. Yeah. And so he came on, he came over and he sat there and went, hi.

Hi. Really liked what you did with the mixes. Absolutely very good work. I'm just gonna change everything. I was like, oh my God. Okay. That's classic. It was brilliant. And he was lovely. And so he sat here and I sat on the floor with the keyboard and mouse so he could sit in the sweet spot 'cause it's really small in this room.

And he changed everything and it was amazing. It was absolutely brilliant. Massively powerful moves, really everything. But I thought, is this random? No, it was played it back and it was absolutely brilliant. It was so brilliant. And he said, can you just do that with the album? I was like, yep. So I went and did it and listened to what he'd done and his concept, which is a total concept for it and everything, did it all.

And he came back in and he changed four tiny things on the whole record. And that was it. Amazing. And I thought, this is amazing. And I've done all the atmos since. That's a great endorsement. 10 12 albums now or something, this stuff. Let's talk about your Atmos work or working in Atmos. Yeah. Why did you decide to work in Atmos?

So it was, 'cause a lot of people don't believe in it. Lockdown, right, right. And in the, I usually in a very lovely way, have been very busy for a long time. I'd normally do five projects a day, generally masses of stuff all the time. Up until what was it, 2020? The very beginning of 2020. Yeah.

And then it lockdown happened and I had no work for the first time, like properly nothing. I was like, oh my God, what? I finished up a couple of things and then I think I did five invoices in four months or something. Nothing. Like nothing. I thought, oh my god. So that was terrifying. So I managed to get stuff going and happening again.

And then a TV show came into mix and the day before it was for David Holmes. I've done a lot of stuff with you and massively great and respect so much. He so good. And he said, I was in LCR by the way and I was like, have a center speaker, let alone really know about mixing an LCR. It seems weird for music for me and still does seem quite odd to do an LCR mix for music.

It's a bit like, okay. Especially more, more so. I called my friend at Genelec and said, can I possibly borrow stroke by maybe a five one system just so I'm covered? And he went, have you ever thought about Atmos? Come and listen. Come to Dolby and listen your skillset, everything you do is gonna work. And I was like, okay.

And so I went to Dolby and. Great, whatever. But I heard the headphone version. I was like, it's a headphone version. You went, yeah. Yeah. It's a binaural version. I heard it and realized this could be exactly the same as a stereo in terms of balance. If you do it right, people still don believe that, but you definitely can and it's really tricky, but you can do it.

Yeah, definitely. And it's exactly the same. So you've got stereo mix, basically of slightly immersive version of ceramics to very immersive, depending how your head is. But it's the same balance, feeling everything processing. It's all the same, moving the same way. You go, oh my God, hang on a minute. This is incredible.

Now I'm really interested 'cause it means I can do a more democratized version that people can actually hear. So three or four months before the Apple announcement when everyone had to start doing atmos, I was mixing one terrible mix to start with. Appalling. I had to play back in Dolby, worse playback.

Horrendous. So embarrassing. And then after that I did it a different way and they were cool. And probably the third mix I'd done, I'd play now and I'm totally happy with that. And I was sending these universal on day one and got that relationship and. The QC person at Universal got in touch going, these are really good.

These are like, really good. What are you doing? And we chatted and we became friends. And I really appreciated her comments and I think she appreciated that. And she made very good comments and everything, and I learned loads from her. And I had this journey of suddenly becoming overwhelmed with work without Moss.

I was never intended to Were you doing the reconstructions? Yeah. From the back catalog. Hardly any back catalog. All new stuff. So all present stuff. Like, all Because that was the time when Yeah. Apple said you needed to have Atmos mixes in order to make playlists. Hundreds of singles. Yeah. Loads of album stuff.

And they're little bits of catalog, right. Because catalog's expensive. It's like, it's expensive to get Yeah. Me to go and mix and master from multi-track before I do the Atmos. It's like, it's not cheap, you know? Yeah. We did all the pesh mode stuff from the Masters. Yeah. Is it? And it was, I mean, you know, it was a two year project to do 10 albums.

How cool. It's a lot of stuff to reconstruct them and Yeah, make sure that they had the right feeling. That's the same thing. And stuff like that. Just did a workshop at real World where I could show some of that because I can't really show it most of the time because it's recorded or it's broadcast or tion because it wasn't, I could show a few things I've done like from scratch, like raw stuff and it's like, okay.

But yeah, no some catalog not masses probably like, like quite a few Eno albums, but from the really big old seventies albums, like two of those. Oh, the ambient stuff, the airports. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's no motor tracks. I can't find 'em, so. Oh wow. That's a shame. Yeah, there's loads of stuff where the multi tracks are gone.

Just loads of stuff. What about using those plugins where you can, the AI stuff or even just the studio plugins where you can take the stems and it'll give you drums. Bass, yeah. Maybe, maybe. But there's not really, they're not really built like that. No, they're not, I mean, they're not conventional music.

I mean, it's not, I dunno how much. Yeah, it's interesting. So yeah, I've just sort of. Gone right into it. And then because I'm really fastidious and have accidentally the perfect skillset for doing atmos, which is, I've done quite a lot of score mixing for Hollywood where you can't use a mix bus 'cause you have to deliver stems Exactly.

Perfectly. The mix. So you can't use a mix bus because I'm not talking about Oh, they've got, we quite like it. They've gotta be exactly the mix. So I've got used to mixing with a keyed stem mix bus. So I'd have drums, bass keys, keys to guitars, if there are any synths and more stuff. Orchestra, everything has its own bus.

And that's the mix bus. And it's all keyed from a pre-mix. Yes. So there's no mix bus. So if you print the stereo mix, it's exactly the same as playing all the stems. Exact identically the same. So that's perfect for atmos. 'cause that's what you do, the objects, you don't have a mixed bus in atmos. That's right.

People talk about using the bed, oh, blah blah, blah. Yeah. But they haven't listened to the headphones because you can't get parity with the bed. I've never heard any, maybe someone's done some. Somewhere, which does, but you just can't do it. No, no discreet signal of mine goes into a bed object wise or otherwise.

It's a surround stuff will do, but I don't put discrete signal in the bed. I use the binaural, the power of the binaural metadata and object positioning to match headphones really, really precisely. Okay. That's it. Can you explain a bit more about how you do that? Yeah. So I'll have, say I have 36 objects or something, stereo, you know, 36 objects maybe, whatever.

So, each of those will, maybe they're stereo, so is that 18 or something? Signals, yeah. Yeah. So, stereo path, each of those is a mixed bus and they're all keyed from a pre-master. So, or multiple pre-master, depending how many stages I'm doing. It can get quite complicated. So maybe the multi-band will be keyed from one pre-master and then the limiter from another or one channel will have something different or whatever.

But they're all basically working off pre-master and, and then that means my mix will be compressed and limited and multi-bank compressed and eqd, maybe dynamic eqd and maybe saturated to all exactly like the master file is. So when you flip between that and the master, you'll hear absolutely no difference at any point.

And I'll be riding the pre-master as well, all kinds of things to match whatever mastering is done. So it's exactly the same. And I'll even occasionally go through in four bar to two bar sections to make sure that it's the same all the way through. Yeah, sure. Really f before I even start doing 'em, everything immersive.

And then lo and behold, when I'm moving these objects, which is where most Atmos mixes fall down, everything's glued and everything will have a corresponding shadow and a kind of feeling in immersive space. So I'm replicating the stereo mask, masking at all times. So you get the same feeling. So when you put one on it is the mix.

Even if it's an immersive space, and it's hard to do sometimes, and if it's heavily mastered, it can be really difficult because you have to worry about how that actually feels immersively and that's without dealing with the issues with Apple spatial, which is just an entire hour long talk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No that's a little bit stressful. You, yeah. What do you think the future holds for Atmos versus stereo? Ah, well, oh, it's only a blip. You people will disappear. It'll go. Yeah. Okay. I'm not convinced about that because I dunno whether Atmos will be the final version of where everything is.

It's a, it can be really good. It can be really good. It can be, it's very difficult. People don't think it is necessarily. I would just do an Atmos mix. Oh, yeah. It's really, really hard to do it. Well, I've had some really bad atmos mix. I would say it's a vast, vast, vast majority. I is not to my technical Yeah.

Taste, let alone objective taste. It's not. Technically even a mix because of how difficult it is to get that feeling and that coherence between one thing and another. People won't master the stems. So they're using basic stuff that isn't even a mix. If you pay the stems back flat, it's not a mix. That'll be, they're just stems.

Yeah. And if that hasn't gone through the mix bus in a useful way, it's just premix and that's going outta the atmos mix. Like, mate, we, you need to probably look at that. So when you are doing atmos mixing, you are doing individual mastering if you like. Yeah. On the individual stems. Yeah. And picking up whatever the mix was hasn't imparted to the stem.

Yes, yes. So, but these are more for atmos conversions, because I don't call that mixing. Sometimes it's mixing. If I'm recreating the mix, but I'm often not. I'm sort of recreating the mastering and then converting into Amos. It's not really a mix. Yeah. I was chatting to Stan Bert, who's a very, very good Atmos mixer.

We say the same thing with, we find it hard calling it a mix. It's not a mix. I'd do lots of mixing. It's not the same thing. So reconstruction, this is like a conversion, Tomo conversion. Okay. But if I'm doing Ziggy Stardust with Ken, that's a mix. Yeah. From Multitrack right back. Yeah. Yeah. Or if we're doing, I did The Power of Love for Frankie goes to Hollywood.

That was so hard. Wow. That was a mix off the multitrack. That's an incredible track hear in Atmos. It is pretty cool. And that's, it was really, really, really hard. 'cause that's a lot of multitrack jumping all over mutes. There's hundreds of mutes on there. You have to work out what the mutes were. Yeah. We had to do that with the pitch Exactly.

So much. Right. It was a nightmare. Yeah. And some of the songs easy, but the big songs, you know, I did a Atmo mix. Rick Garth Jones actually. Yeah. For. A French artist was really good and I said, oh, can I get stems? He went little note at the bottom, no stems. Good luck. I really liked him. He was great.

How brilliant. He's a hero of mine. Absolute legend. Brilliant. Absolute mentor of mine we loved. And he came in and heard the mixes and he was brilliantly loved him. He's not far away from here. No. He's strong. And it was just like, this is so good. And he's so lovely and we had such a good time mixing it.

And then I think he really got into atmos from there as well. So what do you see as the future for Atmos and stereo? Like, I mean, 'cause look for me personally, yeah I always dreamed of the day that you'll have a one file format system. I know I just you know, a multi file format, not imminent.

That's not imminent, I'll tell you that much right now. What do you think is, where does it go? I think, well from now I think it's a race. More of a race to the bottom. In what way? Oh, I think there's some different agendas that play here, which aren't helpful. Like, and you know, someone like Dolby won't make any bones about it.

They're a licensing company. They want as many people to do this as possible. Definitely. But they can license their software to every single audio device. Yeah. They need content in the world, right? They need content. And so the more people that do it, the better and it's not their responsibility to do it.

Well, I kind of get it right. Fine. But from our point of view, I would like it to be somewhat like stereo now. Pretty much where there's a level of kind of like that you should hit. So it's very hard to hear that at the moment. 'cause it's such a wild west and there's so many mental, mental mixes, like early stereo going on, which you're getting lauded is fantastic, which I personally find.

Mental and like really distracting. I'm not sure the original Cons version isn't massively better. You know, I'd like the at version to be always as good as the stereo and preferably better as it's more of an experience. But I find that very, very, very, very, very infrequently to be the case. So I think that is gonna be much, much, much, much bigger as more and more people roll it into the stereo mix, I think is what's gonna happen.

Headphones bash out the Atmos version. That'll do. I think that's where we're getting massively more towards at the moment. I think, I think that that's probably the problem for me. In order for Atmos to be a primary format, it has to be the primary format of mixing. Yeah. What? And then everything else comes from that.

That the only way, but the problem with that is I get the feeling that bands, while they like the idea of it, they're not into it no. Enough. They can't hear it. Yeah. You know, they're not into it enough in the studio. Studios don't necessarily want to invest. No. Record companies definitely don't want people to make records in Atmos.

No. From the beginning, no. God no. You know, and I see a lot of what people are doing as using Atmos as a marketing tool. Rather than a listening to, well, immersive audio is gonna be, is here and it's only going to get more important as people go into how music fits into it. Is that for discussion?

Well, I think it's just currently is just plummeting to the parcel release resistance. Please. Can we just get, can we get the stereo guy to do it? Can we just produce content and to hell with the quality? Exactly. Can we just get one less email by having the stereo person do it and then they're fine.

They're gonna charge the same as the Atmos guy now or less. Let the stereo person do it, then it's done. But they don't know what they're doing. And they'll often stereo mixers who aren't experienced in Atmos, God, I want to do it. So I'll preserve my mix and I'm like, you wanna send to me who will actually preserve your mix?

Because I'm two and a half thousand Atmos mixers in, and you are none in, and I can guarantee what you do is not gonna sound like a stereo mix. And you might not even be able to tell because you don't know the boundaries of what's possible because you haven't, there's not enough atmos content out there, which does preserve the stereo mix, which is very possible, which is all people want to do generally.

It's so technically difficult. I wouldn't like to do my first mix for me. Do you know what I mean? Well that's why I think it has to be the primary mix. Yeah. If people sat in the studio and said Stereo is secondary. Yeah. That way you could make the atmos mix in the best possible way. All the bow mixes, the stereo is the Atmos mix.

Yeah. It's the fold down. Yeah. Yes. The new thing we've just done, which I can't talk about yet, the st We did the stereo mix by the ATMOS mix. Yeah. And then folded out the Atmos mix from it. It's the same thing. I think that's exactly, that's the only way Atmos It's great. Becomes the primary. It works great format.

I'm sure it does. Yeah. And then you've got binaural as well. Yeah. Which is a another spoke in the wheel. Well, and an Apples spatial. But what we're getting now, 'cause now we can talk about it a little bit, is Apple has released the A-S-A-S-A-S-F Apples Spatial Audio format. Yeah.

Yeah. So if people don't think that's very quietly, incidentally, and a patent's come out the other day very quietly. There's, it's public, it's there there's an apple spatial audio format paint. I would, everyone doing mixing. Should watch what Apple does. Yeah. Very, very, very carefully. They should be interested in what Apple does because they're the most massive company they've had.

The full effect on Atmos is here because they've pushed it more than anyone else. Again, like I say though, primarily in my opinion, maybe as a marketing tool, absolutely. But they're also definitely very passionate about Yeah. The thing they're focused on, they've done amazingly, which is head tracking.

Yeah. It's really convincing. I think it's amazingly convincing. I like how it sounds with music, but that's not, they've been their focus. They've been focusing on their VR world. Right. And it's amazing. It's absolutely incredible. And I think, you know, they're very, very, very clever company in loads of ways.

And I think people dismissing all this stuff out of hand is, I think is a little bit shortsighted, but who knows how quickly things. There's also Google Eclipse, which isn't right, which isn't really focused on music, but it's gonna be a rapper for spatial audio. Ev, ignore it at your peril.

You know? And Sony have released a new by no mixing environment. Yeah. But unfortunately, Sony, you know, they're the company like JVCU, screw, they have great technology, but they don't license it to anyone. Yeah. And no one, no one will use it. It's also tainted with Sony 360 ra, which is a completely different thing, which is the worst headphone experience I've ever heard in my life.

Think. But great on speakers, really cool. But it's just like, but this is all like a big whirlwind of stuff. Like, at the moment if I like, I'm gonna have a band again, because they heard the Apple formatting and why, why is it sound bad? And I'm going, I have no controls, nothing. I have no, I can't do anything about this.

All we can do. Whatever I do is all gonna be spatialized with a little reverb on it. But it's really dry at the beginning, not in this format. And that's, I have no control. I can't make it off. That's terrible, isn't it? So it's really difficult conversation to have because they like the speaker mix and they like the bin.

It's great. It's our mix. This isn't, what can we do? And I go, nothing. So loads of bands just say no, not having any spa reversion, which is also fine. Guess I know you have minimal amounts of time. Sure, yeah. I'm incredibly grateful. No worries. But there's a couple of things that I just do wanna talk about, right?

The first is the plugin. Oh yes. Let's talk about the plugin, because I think that's a fairly big moment for a producer. It's mental, right? Not just necessarily. So any of us, you know, any of us get plugins, you know, and to be brought in by a company, certainly with the reputation of Arturo. Yeah.

They are no joke. And working closely with them makes me respect them even more. They're so good. How did that come about? I've had this. The way I do things for ages with one part of my drum workflow, right? If I'm doing something, like I did a show called Killing Eve, did loads of drum recording, and all of that is stylized drums, right?

It's not a drum kit in a room. It's me getting a reference of a rare track off final often and making the drums sound exactly like it. So I'll have a process for doing that, and I've always had this multilayered kind of way of doing things and processing would be great if I had it in one plugin rather than 10, and outboard and recording and all this kind of complicated way of doing stuff.

And so I made it in actually using waves in a kind of, studio verse thing. Yeah. This macro complicated thing. This really, it really works. It's really cool. I wish I could solve some of the problems. And then I worked with Arturia for years now when they have a new plugin idea, I'll often get a shout and go, what do you think?

Or, Hey, what do you reckon we should do about this? And I have a chat and they're brilliant. Be a testing. Yeah. And sort of like initial idea, bouncer, you know, about something going, oh, could we make it better? Like, the amp plugin came up because I was like, can we please? And they were, yeah, we'll do it. And they did it.

And and if you get it right, it's really, really good. But all kinds of things like that. And they ran things past me. So I called up, said, can I play you something? And they're like, yeah, sure. Which is a privileged position to be in anyway. But so the relationship, and I said, listen, and we jumped on Zoom.

I said, look, right, here's my before. Okay, and here's after. And the peak level hasn't changed at any point. The peak level is exactly the same. And they're playing it to him. And then I got to like example two and he went one moment and then people started coming around and I went, oh, this is good. They're playing.

And they go and he goes, right, he, okay, we're doing this and off. And then like a couple months later we do a yes no go thing. It's got this green lit, first one, green lit, and then second one they do like a feasibility kind of thing and it go green lit. We're on it, right? Let's go, here's the contract, let's do this.

And then I made a prototype in Ableton, sent it to them. And this is using like third party manufacturer? No, I use all their stuff. All their stuff. Okay. It's close as I can. There's some stuff we least, they've got all the external plugins, they've got loads of stuff in outboard gear. Yeah. And it's really, really, really good.

Yeah. It's amazing. And, but there's stuff they didn't have, so then they made it and they made a transit designer. That's the best one I've ever heard in the box bar none. Absolutely. You buy that somebody. I dunno yet. Okay. I would hope so. That'd be great. But at the moment, you know, they should be able to.

I hope so. It'd be wonderful if wonderful. If they do, that'd be so good. But it's part of the plugin at the moment. But when that came back, they sent me the first prototype, right, the very first one, the alpha, which is a bunch of knobs on the screen. And they have an incredible guy there called Clel.

He's like a mastering engineer but also is in the coding world and is very, very smart. And he's got it all. 'cause it's quite filthy. This, it's like not a nice, polite plugin. It is gnarly as hell. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. If want it, it can be really as well. It's totally dirty, but you can go mentor with it, like full apex destruction with it, you know.

He goes really, really intense. All very minimal, just the touch. So it's got the whole range. He got it and he sent it back and I was like, i've got no comments. Wow. It's perfect. You just did what I said, but you made every bit of it better. It's all in phase. And then he found, he made one thing where you can take down the low pass filter on the distortion path and all the top end of the distortion goes and you can pres shape it so you don't get loads of bloom and tearing in it.

So you get great textured kind of tone. And he said, how about if you could wind back in the clean top end, which is, you can't do, you can now do it. So you wind in the clean top end of the original signal, like a wet dry with a filter in but it's just like this beautiful top end of the break comes back in against all the distortions.

So you can have a totally crunched thing and very naturally sounding, the top end comes back in so it's all open again, but clean and she can have sort of clean top, but it's a bit like what Saturn does. Yeah. But way, way, way more involved and drum focused and powerful. So you can do this huge, there's like multiple layers of tone shaping and they let me keep it all, 'cause there's a tilt.

And there's a tone control as well and an eq. So they go, why do you need And two filters, why do you need all these? 'cause when you're tone shaping with distortion, you need to, at each stage, constantly be shaping all of it. You can get a distortion. That sounds incredibly powerful, not just crunched. Yeah, because anyone can do a crunchy, distort rather.

There you go, get turn up the fire drums. These are lo-fi drums that are so punchy that'll not go for seat. And the peak level stays the same. So when you put it into a mix, how do they managed to do that? Because of the multiple layers of clever clipping all the way through that relate all to everything relates to everything all the way through.

It's so clever what they've done, but it means, and I really had to fight for that. 'cause they're all take the clipping off down. Is that your suggestion? Yeah, that's how I built it. 'cause when I've got a mix so this is, sorry, sorry. This sounds very familiar to your way of mixing an atmos. Oh. Like in terms of.

Prem mixing, taking the pre-mix stuff and Oh you know, compressing it and doing the individual mastering stages. Oh yeah. Maybe a bit. Yeah. It's basically about maintaining that impact on my final mix bus, yeah. Obviously I'll get more RMS, but when I get the drums will be the same peak, so I can actually go into a mix that I've done and really goose up the drums a lot and not mess up my end chain at all.

So it gives me much more flexibility, a bit more like heating tape hard, you know, where you could get more, but control that peak. That was what it starts and it's like it does it so well, you can like. Oh, if we have any time, I'll show you before and after. It's completely insane. It's like the perceptive difference is so massive.

You never use it. 'cause it's so insanely huge. So I would often do set it as it's meant to be, like in a practical, real world, like doing the recording the other day and I'd get it in the peak's the same and I can actually release it a bit and make it more dynamic. Turn it down. There's only you can do, you don't have to.

So I have more dynamic, less dynamic and keep the level the same all the time. It's great. It's so useful. Have you got any plans to do any more with them? Not at the moment though. I keep an eye on them. They're really, their output is unbelievable now. Stuff they're doing so incredible. Yeah. It's a fantastic company.

Oh God. And the yeah. It's just the people there are the best bit. So. Great. So great. Got one final question. Sure. One final question and that is, it's a pretty standard one really. Which is a lot of people listening will want to be. And Emory, oh dear. No. Or Kevin, Ron. Yeah. Maybe, maybe not now.

You got any advice for them? Yeah. You c you can't, so you can only do it yourself. So that's all you've got. But how do they do that? I do. Well, what advice are you gonna give them to be the next em aim, hire and be be financially stable before you start out? No, it's it's, it is tricky.

You've got to just listen to get some taste. That's it. In the nicest way, it's all about taste. It's whole business. In some ways, taste wins over everything. And if your taste aligns with something being successful, like a Rick Rubin is a brilliant example. He's just taste. Yeah. Yeah. And he doesn't like it.

It doesn't go. And if he does like it, it's often a massive smash, you know, and he gets the right people around him and does something. But that's just his bump. How'd you learn? How'd you learn that? You just have to listen. Listen and listen. Listen and make sense of it all. So when you hear other people's stuff, you know why you don't like it.

That would be awesome. That's a very useful skill to get if you go, all right, so I get this thing comes in, they're not sure about it. They don't know why. I know exactly why it's 'cause you put the drums from this genre in and it's insane and it means nothing to this. What you need is this thing instead and it'll make sense of the project.

Like Jim Avis is really good like that. He always has a great perspective on why something's working or not. And that was what I noticed about him being a great producer was like, oh, he always has a concept. He has a point of view on this. Whatever. It's, there's always some point of view going on. Even if he doesn't know what's gonna end up.

Like he knows what he likes and that's what he can do. When I'm at uni and teaching my students, I, the first thing I say to them is, most people when they listen to music, they've got two opinions. They like it. Or they don't like it. Yeah. And, but they dunno why. Yeah. That's our job. Yeah. Our job is to understand why it's something is good.

Yeah. Or why something isn't good. Yeah. You know? And. You know, the third opinion is, huh? Yeah. It's all right. And I say, I'd much rather people hate my work than go, yeah, it's all right. And have very no opinion on it. Yeah. Because at least you're offending someone and to someone it would be good.

Yeah. So I've thought about this a lot and I get asked often, oh, what advice have you got? And he goes, I could take you in and show you my mix bus and show you how I've tracked something and play you a bunch of stuff and show you why I've done it. And it would make no, it would be no benefit to you whatsoever.

'cause you don't have my ears. That's right. Not my brilliant ears, my, my taste and my ears. You dunno. Why really? I could show you why I've shown loads of people. It's a difficult thing about making a plugin. It's like, I, this is perfect for me. And then talking to all the, the easy bit was building it. The hard bit was getting it to, to market.

Yeah. Because it has to be not for me, it's for everyone to use. How do I take my taste out of it and let it be useful to everyone? And that was the hardest thing with this plugin. And it was a great lesson in that. Yeah. And again. Again, I say you could literally copy everything I'm doing. Yeah. And it wouldn't sound the same.

Yeah. My friend did this because you don't have my ears with Alan Molder. He did it. He was working with Alan Molder. Oh man. So every single thing he did all the same things. It doesn't sound anything like him. You know, there's a man who I hugely admire. He's incredible. Absolutely relentlessly incredible.

You know, I did interview him for the podcast and I picked out one of his records that I absolutely love, and I said, how did you do that? And he went, do you know what? I just don't know. Yeah. I played around with it until I thought it was good. Yeah, exactly. That's always the answer. Always the answer, you know?

And I was like, oh, come on Alan, please tell me that. And he went, I don't know. You know, I play around with stuff. Yeah. And then at some point I go, oh, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Let me leave it. Let me sit with it for a while. Yeah. And see if it's all right and see if it's still all right in 10 minutes time or 20 minutes time.

That's the voice of wisdom right there. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I got to hang out with Chad Blake a bit different recently. Who I love Atabsolutely Prob, maybe my favorite just 'cause it's just, that's his sound. I just made some incredible records. But it's just like he only does his sound and like that what a great thing.

Right. And it's a very similar thing. It's like, you know, I just play with it till the end. Like everyone does it even pretty much if you go and go, I will do this and this and this and yeah, some people have like a sound, which is just like, yeah, every record they do sounds exactly the same. And you go, okay, cool, you're doing something the same at least all the time.

But even then it can just be how they're here. It's just you. They make it the same. You put 'em in with a Mace 6 0 4 or a master console or in the box and it will just always sound the same. And a couple of people straight away who I really like, who are just the same. Everything is the same. Not samples, not anything that just makes stuff sound.

Yeah. Like they hear it. Well that's their sound though, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And mate, it's been so fascinating talking to you. Oh, pleasure. And I really hope that the people listening get the enthusiasm from you and apply that to their careers really. 'cause I think that amongst many other tips of information, that enthusiasm that you have for what you're doing for me personally is where it all starts and finishes.

Yeah. Because it is not easy really. It's quite draining as a thing to do. It's a draining job. Very draining. And especially you higher and higher up the tree, it's more draining because you're more responsible for all of it. Yes. And if you're gonna spend 14 hours a day with five people for three months Yeah.

You better be enthusiastic about it. 'cause otherwise it's hard work. Yeah. Almost the hardest thing now for me is we don't get any of that time. Yeah. Ever. Yeah, I'd love to have that time, but you don't get it. So you gotta get your enthusiasm all of it out in six hours instead, which is fun. But anyway.

Anyway, it's been brilliant. Thank you. Nice one, nice one, Kevin. Thanks for coming, man.

Thank you for listening. And be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all our other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the Sound on Sound slash podcasts website page where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.

This has been a Mixbus production by me, Kevin Paul, for Sound On Sound.