Sun - May 4, 2008

Mastering

After mixing comes mastering where final eq and compression is applied to the 2mix. For this record, we did most of our mastering with Leon Zervos at Sterling and then did final assembly and some last minute tweaks with my good friend Dan Shike of Tone and Volume. In this picture he reminds me of Tank from the matrix and I can almost hear him picking up the phone with "operator". Dan has a pair of speakers that cost $18,000. His job is to listen to music through those speakers all day. Not a bad day job. Dan helped design my studio and he's an all around audio whiz. He looks tough but if you look carefully you can see a carebear somewhere in this pic. Also he has 4 cats.

Posted at 08:01 PM    

Mon - April 21, 2008

It is finished (mostly)

Sorry I was gone, it was a really intense month of 18 hour days. I lost track of how many all nighters I pulled. I would not advise it. While there is no such thing as a musical emergency, it sure felt like one. I've been holed up with Reid Shippen, the best mix guy I know. In the back is Buckley, the new boy wonder.

We're done now. Mostly. ;)

blogging will resume shortly when I feel more like a human being again.

Posted at 04:04 PM    

Tue - January 29, 2008

vibe

We were at vibe56 last week tracking drums for this record; now tentatively titled "Rock What You Got". Vibe is an old house that used to be known as the dugout where Brown Bannister made his home. I asked Lee to find the best room in town to track drums and he wanted to use vibe, so to vibe we went. Brandon blew through all the songs in under 2 days... the rest of the time was spent trying to fix the sound of the kick drum, which after much hoopla it was discovered that I actually wanted a felt beater instead of a wood one. my bad. It only took 2 days because we spent a week in pre production at my house and he practiced for a week, so we were ready when we got there.

Inpop has a new design intern named breezy and she shot one of the few pictures of me that you'll see on this blog. The picture is worthy because I am wearing the greatest hoodie ever. Matt got it for me, it's a marc ecko with Star Wars pictures embroidered all over it. Seriously it's amazing. It will go with my shirt that has R2D2 holding a spray paint can and a boom box. I will only wear it for special occasions.

Really, it's that cool....

Posted at 04:27 PM    

Sat - January 19, 2008

Guitar hero

So we're done arranging our demos. Now we're going back and replacing everything in the demo with tighter takes and better sounds. We've started our unfulfilled quest for the holy grail of guitar sounds again. We've never quite found the grail, but we do get better tones each record we make. As you can see, we've gathered most of our amps together so we can experiment. It looks like a guitar center up here, except we can touch stuff without feeling guilty.

Posted at 03:14 AM    

Fri - December 21, 2007

band camp 07

Sorry I haven't been blogging, I've spent a few days holed up with Brandon, Dave and Matt at camp Superchick. When we write, everyone works with me one on one so I can tap into their ideas without any pressure from everyone else. After we get some ideas that we like, all the guys sit down to work out the arrangement as a band because when the song has a direction already, it's easy for us to tell which parts fit and which don't. We're not actually tracking drums here, we're using v-drums to keep the volume down since no one wants to hear live drums 11 hours a day in close quarters. It also gives me the midi information so I can manipulate it at will. We had lots of fun trying crazy ideas, which we do as much as possible when it's free. We only spend 2 days in a big studio tracking drums and besides the mix, that's the only money we spend renting studios. Nowadays the technology is so affordable you can set up almost anywhere with very little gear. The most important thing is how your space sounds and I've got a blog coming that will discuss how to control sound with cheap 703 fiberglass.

Posted at 01:42 AM    

Thu - September 6, 2007

Gold plated diapers....

I know a lot of you have stacks of gold records and this ain't no big thang, cause I've seen them piled up in the backs of your studios still unopened. This is my first one though and forgive me for getting excited about it. Some of you have probably been reading this blog all the way back to when I blogged about the song we wrote and produced with Toby. Well, here it is, full circle...

Things have been hot and heavy in the studio with superchick lately and I can tell you now, this will be our best album yet.

Posted at 11:56 PM    

Sun - June 10, 2007

Wed - March 28, 2007

Reid's assistant replaced by robot.

Back in the studio mixing with Reid. Brother ThumpMonk Gocher kicked out a great remix for the newsboys remix album that i produced. Newsboys are back yo. Reid's new assistant isn't actually a robot. His name is Buckley and he's almost as fun as R2D2. Almost. He cannot however fix the hyperdrive. While we're doing a soundstage post, I'll throw in the new promo shots I did for them.

Posted at 02:10 AM    

Sat - July 22, 2006

Shaun of the dead

In which Shaun gets shorn.

So Shaun is fresh off of finishing a song for an artist whose name rhymes with Clay Aiken. I think he's having a reaction to that since he knocked on my door to show me how he'd started a faux hawk. Next thing I know we're out on the deck and the pictures tell the rest of the story. All of this was done without spousal approval, so when Erin was told, her immediate reaction was "tell max he's not my friend." Opinion has been divided between ecstatic and "did you lose a bet or something?" I personally think it looks great and I believe that Shaun's mom is actually in the "for" camp. I think if you're young you might as well try anything you've always wanted to at least once, unless say you're an attorney, in which case, maybe not so much. Erin's final comment was "ok, no motorcycle for you then." and considering I might teach him to ride, I'm starting to feel like a bad influence. Here's Shaun's glamour shot:


Later we ran over to see the third member of our partnership, Reid, and discovered that soundstage had hung a banner for him out front. It was so hilarious we posed in front of it. This is maybe the first picture of the three of us together and it's as good a time as any to begin telling the world that we are launching a company and mean to do some damage in the music and film business. Coming later, a list of how many grammy's, doves and #1s we have between us.

UPDATE: says Brian: Stop me if you've heard this one, 2 mohicans and a hasidim walk into a bar....
UPDATE2: I met Shaun's father in law and when I was introduced, his only words to me were: "so you're the barber..."

Posted at 07:30 PM    

Mon - July 17, 2006

Made Avail in Studio part 2.

I added some photos from day 2. Some of these are at 1600 ISO. If you've been reading the blog, you know I switched from the nikon side to the canon side for the low noise performance of the Canon CMOS sensor. While I was initially disappointed in the high ISO results I was getting, I'm learning that properly exposing the photo in the first place makes a significant difference in the low noise performance. It's important to expose the shadow areas properly because trying to brighten those later will really bring out the noise. These are a little grainy, but the lights were really low in the studio. In the ongoing canon vs. nikon debate, having made the switch 6 months ago I now feel like the glass is comparable, with each side having it's standout lenses. Canon CMOS sensors seem to do one stop better at high ISOs for noise, but the nikon metering and wireless flash system is easier to use. Canon seems slightly cheaper on the entry level and more available, Nikon stuff is slightly better built. D200 or 30D? It depends on your vibe, the D200 is a really lovely camera. So is the 30D. It's basically a draw. The biggest difference is in the shooter. I probably spent a year researching forum boards on the internet and I finally figured out that 90% of the opinionated people who are so vocal on debates actually suck at shooting. The pros don't have time to comment on forum boards, they're out shooting. We should be too.

Any pro on an entry level canon will slaughter an amateur on a top level nikon and vice versa. End of discussion. If you've got a strong opinion, back it up. Show us your stuff.

Here's the link to the updated photo set:
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/PhotoAlbum41.html

Posted at 11:55 AM    

Sat - July 15, 2006

Made Avail in studio

Here's some shots of rock band Made Avail in studio, with Lee Bridges running the show for me. (Lee just mixed a tune for India Arie.) India has the Billboard #1 selling album in the country this week. I'm sure Reid is feeling pretty good about that since he mixed most of it, although his discography is already full of grammy this and #1 that. I'm feeling pretty good about it, since Reid, Shaun and I are launching a company based around treating artists fairly and it never hurts to add more #1s to your company roster. More on that later as we dance with the lions at major record labels. One of the first bands we're launching is chicago based Made Avail and this band is going to do really well.

Here's the photos:
http://homepage.mac.com/maxwax11/PhotoAlbum41.html

Posted at 02:34 AM    

Thu - June 29, 2006

Nothing to prove

I was putting fresh strings on a radio mix for our new song Stand in the Rain and here's a shot of Claire working out cello parts for me. You can catch both Claire and Caitlin on tour with the Shane's in the fall if you want to see them in person. Funny story, the original string parts for this were written on a keyboard by my fellow ThumpMonk Brian. Writing string or guitar parts on a keyboard is a surefire way to write a difficult part because the keyboard doesn't take into account any of the realities of fretting or playing a part on the actual instrument. Caitlin came over sunday to play the violin part and she practically hurled herself against a wall trying to make it work. For three hours she kept trying to nail the part and I watched her self esteem drop lower and lower and lower. Around midnight I called it off and sent her home cause she had reached that point where it was less and less productive. She was completely demoralized when she left despite my efforts to be encouraging. We christened Brian "stringsbane" and she left with the morose comment: "Davidson could have played it."

Ah yes. He could have. Dave Davidson is the go-to guy in this town for strings and anytime you talk about a difficult string part, people always say: "Davidson can play it".

I've never used Davidson, he's a top tier player, he plays on everything and while I can't afford him, I also like to give as many people a chance to play on records as I can, so I typically use less established people. But I've always wanted to use him since he's a bit legendary.

So there I am the next day wondering what I'm going to do about my violin part before mixdown the next day and while I'm pacing in my back yard thinking, a car pulls up, a guy gets out and walks into Shaun's part of the house. (That would be Shaun Shankel btw... who's producing a track right now for an artist that Clay Aiken fans would love to know about... Clay Aiken fans are true believers... I mention the words "Clay" and "Aiken" and the next day I see a 300 hit increase in traffic). Anyways, get this.. the guy looked an awful lot like Dave Davidson. So I mosey on over to the car and peek into the back casually to see if there's a violin in there and sure enough.. it's a violin.

hmmmm. very interesting.

So then I'm standing there wondering if I should text Shaun and ask him if he just happens to have THE Dave Davidson in there and out walks Shaun's assistant a guy we'll call "stretch" and he tells me that it IS Dave Davidson and they're not working, he's just picking up a CD. Right then Dave Davidson walks out.

After explaining to Dave my dilemma, he asks: "well are you set up?" I respond "I can be" and he says "I'll play it".

So we score out the part, it's fun to watch him score by hand since almost no one I work with can read music anymore and he looks at the part for a bit, plays it slow, thinks about it a bit and I'm sitting here prepared to watch the legendary string machine play the unplayable part. Than he affably says:

"you know this part is practically impossible to play.... let's do this, I'll break it up into 2 parts and you can merge them later and it will be groovy".

So he removes the difficult note from the 16th note arpeggio, plays the difficult part alone, I play both tracks together and hey presto... it's done in less than 30 minutes. Most of which was spent scoring the part. So here's the point.

Davidson has nothing to prove. He's not bound by a set of conceptions about what he should be able to do. He just does what it takes to make the music. I'm sure if he wanted to, he could have played the impossible part in one pass but he didn't feel like he had to. I'm not saying it's not fantastic to be a virtuoso. I'm just saying he's reached the point where he's free of trying to prove anything, even to himself. Poor Caitlin threw herself against the rocks because of a conception of who she thinks she should be. In the end, when you care about what the mythical "they" think, you are doing things for the applause of strangers. It's hard to make good art that way.

When we are young, we have a lot to prove. When we have nothing to prove, then we are free.
Release your concept of who you should be or what kind of art you should do.
Enjoy where you're at and what you do.
be free, live free, create free
and maybe someday
you will be legendary.

Posted at 03:55 PM    

Sun - June 11, 2006

more taiko

Well the blog goes dark it's because I'm working up to another one of these mix days... they punctuate my life like weekends do for most people. In the last 3 weeks I have had 2 of these crazy deadlines and pulled all-nighters both times to meet them. This last one was particularly hard since I've been sleep deprived most of the month and around 2 am I started falling asleep in my chair and hating music, life and deadlines in general. Fortunately Melissa had left behind some chocolate covered expresso beans and for someone who never drinks caffeine, they were like red bull to a squirrel.

This weeks project is a thump monks remix of our single "we live" which I've been told you can see the video for (the original track) at MTV overdrive. During the mix, the assistant Steve said: "this sounds epic, it should be in a movie" and to echo a quote from my fellow monk: "all I ever wanted to do was write music for movies...... " of course all I ever wanted to do was write music for movies that I direct. Inpop asked me to think about directing a newsboys music video and I have visions of having them playing a block party whilst Godzilla (or someone like Godzilla but not for copyright reasons) rampages through a model city destroying it.

I think I've shot every conceivable picture there is to shoot of Reid mixing for me, so this last batch are rather experimental.. I went back to something I never do... direct flash. I dunno if these are any good, i've been going through a frustrated with my photography phase lately. I don't know how to get better. I want to be better. Sorry I've been gone, but it's been so busy that I hadn't checked my phone messages in 2 weeks... Joy Williams Yetton.... I didn't even know you left me a message...

Posted at 12:42 PM    

Thu - May 25, 2006

Fri - May 19, 2006

Drum tracking with Ben Phillips

If you're female, you probably want to skip this entry.

How cool is this? Ben has his drums set up in his living room all the time. I dunno how he does it, but I can't imagine a married life in which that's ok with the wife. I do know I have been wise buying the camera gear, the studio gear, the jeep and the motorcycle before marriage. Now I just need to go buy some cool NY loft type furniture and I'll be covered under the "existing construction clause". Hopefully I'm just kidding... but I've already felt some heat to "start making money" with the camera gear. Now granted it's $4500 worth of camera gear this year already, but have you seen what women want in a diamond ring? It's $4500 worth of carbon dust. Mined by children in africa. Don't support blood diamonds! Average diamond markup in a mall store is 50-400%. Diamonds have very little re-sale value, you cannot sell a diamond back to a store for what you paid. Chemically identical lab made diamonds are already being made by the gemesis corporation and stand to devalue current diamonds as they become more common. There is no rarity to diamonds, the scarcity is controlled by the debeers cartel... last year alone, 11.2 million carats were mined in Canada ALONE. I'll stop alienating my female readers now. You can read more about it here:

http://archive.salon.com/business/feature/2000/09/27/diamonds/index.html

Back to the story.
I cut drums today with session drummer Ben Phillips. Ben has the drums set up and ready to go for recording, you just bring your tracks, load them in pro-tools and he plays drums while you press record. Today marked my first experience running pro-tools, which I've managed to avoid thus far by staying firmly in logic. I did buy an mbox to start learning pro-tools but melissa promptly ran off with it and then Brandon poached it from her and who knows where it is now. I may have to buy pro-tools just to be able to use beat detective. Beat detective is mind blowingly cool and there's really nothing like it in logic. Well.. you can recycle things and quantize audio but not across multiple tracks while retaining phase coherency.

Anyways, Ben added some lovely arena rock drummage to the song and I always love when a drummer brings something special. Typically with a good drummer, after I've got a pass that I feel like I can use, I give them a pass where they can just go for it and have fun. As soon as we started rolling on that take, Ben pounded the toms and my hands shot up along with the 50,000 other people in the arena of my mind. Rock and roll forever.

Ben is currently getting some of the best drum sounds in nashville... how's he doing it? Well his drumming technique is excellent to start with, you can peep his mic placements in the picture and he's using the same old gear we all are: Neve/Vintechs 1073s, APIs, UAD 2610s, Distressors and UA1176s.. Of course he's on a mac, which considering that they now also boot windows, there's no reason not to switch. I'm no apple zealot, but seriously, they make good computers.

So wait... I hear some of you asking... what happened to Brandon? Well Brandon still plays drums... for superchick. This wasn't a superchick gig. It was for.... someone.... else.....

Posted at 02:35 AM    

Mon - April 3, 2006

Cover concepts 2

Well, there was enough interest in the rough mock up of this idea to see it through, so though it's doubtful that this is the final cover for our Columbia/Sony re-release, here's my final version of it. I really quite like it... later I'll post a "how to create a vintage object from the future" blog, as this kind of thing can be a bit complicated to figure out on your own. On a completely random side note, the dust and crap I layered into the picture comes from a piece of furniture that toby mac donated to his nanny Jenny, who's a dear friend of mine. She took it home and was going to clean it and I shot a picture of the lovely dust on it and hey presto..

Posted at 03:03 AM    

Mon - March 27, 2006

cover ideas

Well, we're kicking around new cover ideas for the beauty from pain re-release and since this idea I whipped out in 2 hours is gonna get shot down, I thought I'd post it here cause I like it. :)

Posted at 05:40 PM    

Mon - March 13, 2006

Day - 8 Mixing

Well after 3 days of editing, programming, mix prep and general weeding out of the good things from the bad things, we're mixing today. Here's Reid manning the big SSL at Soundstage. Tomorrow, I'll be in NY for mastering and pending label approval we'll be done, which would be a grand total of 2 weeks from Steve Lillywhite asking me if we could write another tune for the record to turning one in. Fortunately, I had a chorus I'd fiddled with before, which was for the next record, but guess I'll have to keep writing more...

Posted at 03:00 PM    

Thu - March 9, 2006

Day 4 - Acoustics, Strings, Stuff we forgot.

Well the last day is always the craziest and yesterday was so nuts that I came home and collapsed into bed without blogging. We got through acoustics and piano in the morning. Once all the main parts are down, I then go back to all the parts of the song I thought could be better and try to fix or improve them. We spent the afternoon layering things and trying to come up with better parts then what we have. Apparently, according to Steve Lillywhite, U2 will be in the middle of a mixdown and Bono or the Edge will come up with a new idea or part and they'll stop mixing and record it right then. Amazing to have that kind of budget. We don't normally get to do that so the last day of tracking with everyone always makes me the feel the way I do when I'm leaving a hotel room.... I sure hope I got everything...

After the band got on a bus to go to the next show, I was left behind to finish the project and we went right into recording string parts. Claire and Caitlin came by to add some string power to our song and by 11:30 at night we were done and packing out. I would tell you about hurricane Caitlin, but I think I just did. We're done with tracking the big stuff, now comes the finicky part... editing and programming and then mix on monday.

This concludes our time at the castle, which saddens me because it had become my home away from home for 12 hours a day for the last 4 days. Actually I don't think I have a home anymore.. I'm just a migrant producer. Valerie the studio manager was wonderful to work with and really helped us out on a deal so I'm looking forward to working with her more. As you can see, when they call it the castle.. they really mean it... it's a castle.

Posted at 08:23 AM    

Tue - March 7, 2006

Day 3 - Vocals

After a frantic lyric writing session this morning, we started vocals. We don't normally enjoy the comforts of a studio like the castle so we took advantage of their collection of vintage microphones to do a mic shootout. Needless to say, I'm looking for a good U67 if anyone wants to sell one.

Posted at 08:41 PM    

Mon - March 6, 2006

Day 2 - Guitars and bass

With Lee at the helm of the SSL console, we've been tracking guitars and bass today. Today we're running a Gibson les paul through a radial JD7 split out to one marshall and one mesa head, going to separate cabs. The cabs are mic'd with a 57 and a 421 through APIs and then distressors. We're trying a a little labs IBP today to correct phase on the mics. In the bottom picture, Dave is playing the guitar Bruno got for us from Gibson to help cross promote our involvement in the Konami game S.L.A.I.

UPDATE: to answer a question michelle asked, as far as I know, the new song will be available on itunes separately for all of you who bought the original album.

Posted at 04:14 PM    

Sun - March 5, 2006

New Song, Day 1 of 4

We're recording a new song for the columbia/sony re-release of Beauty from Pain at a lovely recording studio called the castle. The song isn't completely finished yet, so we spent the first hour or so doing pre-production, which isn't a great idea at $1000 a day. With the band on tour right now we didn't really have much of a choice as there's only 4 days off the road to finish writing and record it. Today is day 1, so drums go down first and I'm writing this on a break while we're getting guitar tones. I will blog till this song is in the can. It's not finished yet, so it's gonna be an interesting run until the end.

Posted at 07:00 PM    

Sun - February 26, 2006

More Cowbell

I spent the weekend in the studio with Steve Lillywhite. He was great to work with, very down to earth and fun. He told us fantastic stories about making records with U2 and Dave Matthews. I'd share them, but I'm sure he'll tell them much better when he gets around to writing his book. So much of his work has been the soundtrack to people's lives that it's quite humbling to have him join me in the studio to work on my songs.

Oh yah.. one more thing.

We're going to be on Columbia/Sony records from now on.

Posted at 10:10 PM    

Fri - February 24, 2006

Sushi in Chicago

When I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago, Craig Bauer took me out for sushi to Japonais, which I highly recommend. Craig mixes "out of the box" on a euphonix through an ssl compressor and he showed me the Korby convertible microphone which incidentally costs more than my first convertible car did. "out of the box" or "in the box" refers to mixing entirely in pro tools or out of pro tools into an analog console. Craig recently scored a grammy for his mixes on Kanye West's late registration and he tells me that Kanye called him from London the week after the grammys hard at work on new tracks. Craig was a fun hang and hopefully he'll make a future appearance on the blog interview section, so we can learn about his creative flow. Next interview: Robin Parrish from infuse magazine.

Posted at 12:34 AM    

Fri - February 17, 2006

A tale of two covers

Well, the CCM reader's choice awards came in and despite not being nominated for anything we took some surprising write-ins including: #2 Favorite live performance, #1 Favorite song, #2 Write a book, #2 Most underrated, #2 Break into the mainstream (that's ironic.. hint hint...) and #1 Favorite album cover. Favorite album cover was especially ironic considering how much pain we went through to birth that one. We started with a concept that Dave and I tossed around, which the label wasn't happy with. We then went through a frustrating 50 + covers to get to the final design. Here's my original test mockup next to the final cover:


And here, you can see some of the 50 other variations we went through, none of which made both label and artist happy. Most of them came from the label side. Creativity can be difficult on a deadline and with conflicting instructions: We wanted darker, Steve wanted shelf pop. Ben got caught in the lighter! darker! crossfire.

You can see them in bigger sizes and with more colors at: http://www.inpop.com/_comps/superchick/
Later after Ben and I hammered out the final cover, Rob came up with a fairly brilliant compromise to make the record pop more on the shelf: He wrapped it in white printed shrink wrap. A cover isn't just about design, it also has to pop out amidst all the other covers on the shelves and I thought Rob brought peace and harmony to our quest for the perfect cover. UPDATE: Ben tells me that the shrink wrap overlay was actually his brilliant idea and that in the end we actually went through 90 cover ideas. Sorry for the misinformation Ben! I know he thinks of it as one of his favorite covers and it's one of mine too. As I recall, what with management and the band and all the label opinions, the whole cover thing took forever and the final cover and booklet as it exists happened because I got Ben on the phone one afternoon and we spent all afternoon hashing it out, emailing ideas back and forth. Sometimes it's best just to get it done without the committee. UPDATED UPDATE: Rob insists it was his idea after all...

Posted at 12:11 AM