Enjoy!

This Friday we’re featuring the one and only Lyle Beniga!  He was one of the first people I religiously followed on Youtube.  ”Nike Boots” was a piece that I saw four years ago that put me in awe.  It was during a time where choreography was pretty new to the Youtube world.  This choreo is flawless, epic, and just plain DOPE!  I still get excited every time I watch it, and I always hit that replay button.  It’s a “watch twice minimum” video for sure.  Check out the original, a recent version, and a tribute piece below!  Get inspired!

The Original:

The Recent:

The Tribute:

DOPE right?  Gets me pumped every time!  Never gets old!  Classic.  Fresh.  EPIC!

Read on for Chris’ advice on mistakes to watch out for when beginning as a tour manager, the importance of networking within the music industry and also to sleep before going on tour because the sleepless hours will begin once the wheels on the bus go round and round.

Rob Marcacci:  Where did you grow up?

Chris Johnson:  I grew up in the Northern Virginia/D.C. area about thirty minutes outside of D.C.  It was basically suburbia, nothing too crazy.  A lot of people there work in or for government there.  Lots of houses, grass, and trees there and that’s about it.

RM:  Were you always interested in music growing up?

CJ:  I wasn’t actually.  Music kind of found me.  I did not initially pursue it.  I was always doing sound and started with learning sound engineering through my church growing up.  I asked a couple random questions on a youth retreat I was on and then the guy that was running it said he would teach me some things.  It turned into me working at the church doing front house stuff for them.

I was also a big athlete in high school.  I was trying to play college basketball in a D3 school or something along those lines.  The basketball thing didn’t work out and I graduated high school owning a lawn and landscaping company.  I realized that I didn’t want to keep mowing lawns and doing landscaping the rest of my life.  I ended up selling my business and wanted to work in a recording studio.  I was an apprentice and took care of a lot of day-to-day stuff.

RM:  How did you get into the studio?  Was this also in Virginia?

CJ:  It was a project studio called Avalon Studios in Maryland.  I went through a company and my friends and I knew nothing about it.  I was doing it through something called Connections and they helped you get an apprenticeship and kind like on the job training.  I worked there for about two years in and out of the studio.

I started getting more involved with finding bands that I liked and hunting that stuff out.  I started to get involved with my local scene and going to shows.  I found out that a few guys I went to high school with were in bands.  I met a local promoter who lived in the Northern Virginia area and he ran a booking company there.  He booked at a few venues around the area in Virginia.  We talked at a My Favorite Highway show and hit it off.  He offered me a job to work as an assistant talent buyer and helped with the productions of all the shows, sound if need be, running the door, basic stuff.

I worked for him for about a year and then I ended up leaving to start my own company in Northern Virginia for about three years and booked shows throughout all of Virginia.  I did a couple things in Maryland as well.  About two years into my doing that, a bunch of bands in the area started to get signed.  My Favorite Highway got signed to Virgin Records.  Friday Night Boys got signed to Fueled By Ramen.  The Bigger Lights got signed to Doghouse.  I had been friends with those guys and they asked me if I wanted to come out on the road to tour manage for them so I went out on tour with them for about five months.

We ended up doing a tour with Never Shout Never and Chris offered me a job with him as an assistant tour/stage manager.  I did a tour and a half with Chris and then I worked for a bunch of other bands like Artist Vs. Poet, Versaemerge, Conditions, and I’m about to go back out on tour now.  I haven’t toured in over a year  but I’m about to go back out with a guy named Matt Toka who just signed with Warner Brother Records.  I did Warped Tour and many other cool tours, got to see the country but the biggest goal was for me to develop myself and be extremely well rounded.  I wanted to learn the industry inside and out in order to be a manager.  I like the business aspect of it; I like helping develop companies, working with bands, marketing ideas and enjoy all of that.  Tour managing helped me to meet a lot of good people and expand my network.

RM:  Could you explain your duties as a tour manager?

CJ:  Being a tour manager is being a parent on the road.  You are supervising everything.  It depends on the band with how much supervision is really needed.  Some bands need a lot of supervision to keep them in check if they are crazy partiers or if they aren’t responsible.  Then there are older mature bands where you are mainly taking care of venue-oriented things. You are their manager while on the road and following through with everything the label is sending you.  There is press, interviews, and lining up times for interviews for the band.  You have to make sure all the technical aspects are taken care of, all the merch is good, make sure you have back stock, and you get the drop shipments in.  Also coordinating with the drum and guitar techs to make sure the gear is ready to go. The artist has to be taken care of one hundred percent.

It is a weird position because the band is your boss and they are the ones in charge.  They are also giving you the power to be in charge.  Anything I may say, or a tour manager may say, could ultimately get shot down by whatever the band wants to do and you are there for advisement.  It is a very tough line to walk and it is definitely tricky.  If anything goes wrong on the road you are the first person to get blamed for it and if anything goes right on the road you are the last person to get the praise for it.  It is not a glamorous job at all.  A lot of kids think that touring is awesome because you get to see how the bands live and get see a big party.  A lot of times it is not easy as a tour member or a crew member; it is a lot of hard work and many sleepless nights.  The band might be sleeping but if you are in a van you might be the one driving overnight.  You have to do a lot of the heavy lifting so the band’s time on the road is taken care of so they don’t have to worry. They are there to perform for the fans.

RM:  You mentioned you started your own promotional company back on the east coast.  Did you like taking care of the business side of that company and also for your current company, Music Machine?

CJ:  I am definitely the business end of the company with Music Machine.  I have always been extremely entrepreneurial and always looking for opportunities to expand.  I have been a business person ever since I was in high school.  I’ve owned my businesses since I was fifteen years old.  If you are looking to be involved in the music industry, and you are not an artist, you need to be a very business oriented person.  Take a lot of business classes and not necessarily just music business classes.  It is important for the future growth of the music industry to have people thinking outside the box.  When I work with bands on the management side I always try to think outside the box, not just the standard of how it’s been done for the past fifteen years.  The past has led us to this point now where the industry is in shambles and it is looking for a new model for it to get back up where it was twenty years ago.

It is great to take music industry classes but I think it is more important to go out and get a degree that is going to have some other thoughts and ideas in more of a corporate world that will translate over into the music world.  When you take the music industry classes you are learning about the way things have been done in the past.  By the time you get out of school and into the work place you are now unlearning some of the things you learned in school.  Going to school to be a tour manager is not worth your $40,000 a year or whatever the cost may be.  If you really want to be a tour manager you should look into working at a venue and search out for a talent buyer or agent.  You could also work for a promoter and this can get you involved with some of those bands.  You do not need a degree for touring.  That is great if you do go to school for music and there is nothing wrong with it.

What I am trying to say though is that kids are telling me they are going to school to be a tour manager and I am just saying that there are other avenues to get to that point besides music school.  If they do want to go to school, I think that Full Sail has a great music program.  They have a couple good road programs and their live audio classes are great too.  This would help you be a more versatile person on the road and could possibly allow you to charge more money for being on the road.  Your salary for being with that band might go up with that knowledge.  Internships are also very helpful for getting started, especially in Los Angeles, New York and Nashville.  A lot of hard work and luck are involved.  I have been very blessed with the opportunities that have presented themselves but at the same time it has been a lot of hard work.

RM:  How did you startup Music Machine?

CJ:  I previously owned a promotions company back in Virginia and I met Luca Zanello through a mutual friend.  He was in a band at the time and we just started hanging out.  We always stayed in touch and ran ideas back and forth throughout the years.  He stumbled upon this one band called My Ticket Home.  Luca was telling me to check the band out so I flew out there to see them and they blew me away. We decided to manage the band together for a while and then I got really busy with being on the road.  I ended up pulling myself away from that project.

A year ago I moved to LA and I would still stay in touch with Luca.  We were running ideas back and forth about different bands and projects we had some interests in.  I ended up going to work for a big management company out here as an assistant.  I left that company to go off and do my own thing.  Luca and I always talked about starting up our own company so we decided to start it up as a real independent type company.  We are very family orientated with how we run our business.  We wanted to work with bands that we feel have great potential in music that we love and actively support to build a strong foundation for artists to go to.  We will be fighting for them day in and day out.

If someone told us a couple months ago that we would be expanding and bringing in a third manager to the company we wouldn’t really believe you.  A lot of great opportunities have come our way and we are extremely blessed for everything.

RM:  What are some important steps for someone if he or she wants to start their own company?

CJ:  First off make sure you have a product or service that is going to be competitive and something you can go after.  A lot of kids will go out and jump the gun and just immediately want to be a manager.  What can you actually provide this artist or band to help achieve what their goals may be?  If you can’t do that then you need to pause and pump the brakes to refocus on spending time with people that have been in the industry for awhile.  If you have that service or product that is ready to go then it is honestly about getting yourself out there and expanding your network.

There are a lot of people out there that are “managers” and they manage these bands but they are actually doing a disservice to the band because they do not know what they are providing.  Their insights are not showing them how to do things and that is how people get screwed over.  At the same time, everybody came from somewhere.  I came out of high school not knowing anything about music and I just worked hard and listened to what people have to say.  Just make sure you know what you are doing and you are not leading people astray.  You will ruin your reputation before you even have one.  In this industry, your name is kind of all you got and the reputation that you build.  If you tarnish that reputation before you have anything to put your feet on you will sell people short.

It is tough if you are an independent person going out right now and starting your own company.  Being the lone ranger in a sense, like we are, people are going to look past you and look over you and not expect anything.  You have to be willing to put in long hours and be willing to hear a lot of no’s.  That doesn’t mean that you have to accept the no’s but it just means that you are going to hear no more than you will hear yes.  There will be frustrating days.

Like I said, starting a company is tough.  There is probably a wrong way to do it and a right way but in the end everyone is different and so is there situation.  If there were one right way everyone would be doing it.  There will never be one specific avenue to go through.

RM:  What are some mistakes you made along the way that you learned from?

CJ:  Booking an uber pop band in a hardcore market.  Paying a band $1200 when they should be getting $200.  Those are mistakes that everyone at some point in time has made.  Being a manager you make mistakes everyday and you learn from it.  You have to be willing to accept those mistakes by taking risks and sometimes it doesn’t work out.  You have to be able to be on your toes to rebound from those mistakes.  Whether it is putting a band on a wrong type of package and they are out on the road playing in a bunch of bars in front of forty year olds when their demographic should be teenagers.

A lot of younger bands think that they should be touring.  That is honestly not an intelligent move.  I call it “touring smart” and it is working on not overextending yourself.  If you don’t have the money to tour, there is no reason for you to go out because you will not make money as an independent unsigned band.  Having those kinds of conversations as a manager to help the band limiting those mistakes.  You don’t want to put them in a tough financial position.

It is a trial and error everyday.  You might try something new with one client that you might not try with another to see which one works.  It is a daily challenge.

RM:  Do you have any additional advice you would like to give people starting out as a tour manager?

CJ:  You have to be open to putting the band in front of you.  Whether it is a situation that they want to eat at a specific place where you cant eat anything there because maybe you have a food allergy.  Or on a day off you want to do something that the band might not want to.  On the road you might want to crash one night but the band wants you to drive.  You have to be an extremely selfless person.  Take care of the band first because they are your bosses and they have you out on the road.  While you are in charge, they are also in charge of you in some aspects.  Get as much sleep as you can before you go out on tour and be prepared to not sleep while on tour.

If you are a newer tour manager you will most likely be working with smaller bands.  That is the time to learn everything you can. You can get the opportunity to learn how to run sound, how to do monitors, and adding value to you being out on the road will help continue your career.  Also, use your time wisely.  I have a problem of biting off so much that it is hard to chew.  I try to go above and beyond every artist that I work for.  I try to make sure that when they are on the road all they have to think about is breathing.  Other than that, work hard, stay organized and keep track of everything including receipts and money.

You can learn everything you need to about being a tour manager but at the end of the day you are dealing with people in a close confined space for about 3 months at a time.  You are managing personalities and managing people so being a people person will help.  You have to be able to give a hard no when it might be a little bit awkward.  Sometimes you will have to get in somebody’s face whether it is a promoter not paying a band or a production manager not giving you the right power drops that you need.  Inner turmoil will come up between the bands on tour as well and you have to be able to stop it.

Thank you again to Chris for his advice on being a tour manger and tips on how to start up a company.  Make sure to follow him on twitter @iamChrisJohnson and check out his company website Music Machine here.

I was trying to dig up anything I could online but had no success.  The most I could find, which happens to be pretty sweet, was a piece from NPR where they had the band record themselves for a few days on tour.  Unfortunately, the link dates back to 2003 and only one of the clips is available, but it is still worth checking out.  The article says they used a Minidisc recorder to document their tour… Man I feel old.  I remember getting a Minidisc player back in middle school expecting for it to “blow up” only to see it have a major fade out.  I bought The Cable Guy soundtrack and Pearl Jam’s VS on minidisc.  I regret some of musical choices back then.

Listen to one part of their “Life on the Road” here.

I was able to find one decent picture of the band and that was used in the banner.  I found one picture in the album liner notes:

After not being able to find any images, youtube videos, and so on of the band, I decided to look up the members and see what they are currently up to.  Vocalist Josh Ostrander and drummer Greg Lyons have been in the band Eastern Conference Champions for the past several years.  I listened to their albums Ameritown (2007) and Speak-Ahh (2011), both of which are amazing and still maintain Laguardia’s sound.  I’m glad that ECC is still successful and Ostrander and Lyons are able to continue creating smart music.  Their songwriting, from both Laguardia and ECC, is well thought out and not standard time and structure (verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus).  ECC also had their song, A Million Miles An Hour, featured on the Twilight soundtrack:

The way most people perceive a band’s success by being signed to a label is often misconstrued.  Laguardia’s Welcome to the Middle was released on Universal Records and received minimal promotion, no radio play, and it was a huge disservice to the band.  There are a few songs on the album that could have easily been on the alternative charts.  The music industry is unpredictable and while their first band didn’t have lasting success at least Lyons and Ostrander are getting more recognition with ECC that is well overdue.

Listen to Laguardia’s Welcome To The Middle on Spotify.

The Box by Eastern Conference Champions:

The intern job gave Malpass enough knowledge to be able to open his own studio in Atlanta, Marigolds and Monsters.  He started out by working with a lot of bands on the label One Eleven, such as Rookie of the Year, Rory, Inkwell, and Devin Lima.  Since then he has produced, engineered and mixed tracks/albums for Tides of Man, Decoder, Lydia, All Get Out, Hey Monday, and Train.  Malpass also has his own band with Leighton, singer of Lydia, called The Cinema.  Read on to hear his story and the importance of being persistent in the music industry.

Rob Marcacci:  Where did you grow up?

Matt Malpass:  I grew up in a city next to Atlanta called Augusta.  It is about two hours outside Atlanta.  There is not really much going on in the town.  I was homeschooled there and wasn’t able to be involved in any music programs.  I was stuck inside the house all the time.  I definitely came from a place where there was not much of an opportunity for what I wanted to do.

RM:  Were you homeschooled throughout middle and high school?

MM:  Yeah.  I went to elementary school then middle and high school I was homeschooled.  The cool thing about that was it gave me a chance to get into the music thing.  My brothers and I started a band with some other people.  We did some tours and went to New York to record.  That was the first place I figured out that was where I wanted to be.  I could see myself working in a studio.

RM:  You got to record in New York while you were still in high school?

MM:  Yeah.  It was at The Loft in New York.  I was one of the guys that wrote a lot of the songs in the band and so I was always next to the mixing board with the producer.  I remember at one point the producer looked over and said, “hey you know what, you should be getting an associate producer credit for this.”  Our time in New York recording with the band was a real eye opener for me.  At the time it seemed like an unrealistic job so I didn’t pursue it then but it was the first chance I got to see it.

RM:  When did you and your brother initially get interested in music?

MM:  My grandpa was a drummer in an old jazz band back in the day.  My other grandpa was a guitar player in a country/folk band.  Growing up we were always around music and even when the other kids would go out to play basketball my brother and I would just be in bands.  We would teach ourselves how to play and do little concerts in the house.  The music was always around us.  I have always been obsessed with music.  Anyone that has that drive at an early age should see it as a good signal that you have something you should pursue.  It was something I could never get away from.

RM:  Going back to the New York trip, were your parents supportive and cool with it?

MM:  I guess not everyone has this but my parents are really supportive.  My brothers were the managers of our band in high school and my parents gave their blessing to the whole thing.  My dad came to New York with us when we recorded because my brother Jeff, who now works in the studio with me, was 11 years old at the time.  My dad came up with us to chaperone.  A couple years ago, when I was working as a computer network engineer, I quit my job to go into music.  They were supportive of that decision even though I quit a job that was really successful and had good retirement.  The hard part is you never know if you will make money in the new career or end up dead broke.

RM:  At what point did you feel it was right to leave your job?

MM:  It was really impulsive.  A lot of my friends looked at me and were saying, “oh I can’t believe you’re going to do that.”  Honestly, it was sitting at a desk job and having to wear long-sleeve shirts.  I knew it wasn’t what I was supposed to do.  I went to school for computers, had a decent job, but it wasn’t making me happy.  I thought I would be stuck the rest of my life sitting at a desk doing something that I didn’t want to do.  I quit that job and around the same time I got married; which looks terrible getting married and quitting a stable job but my wife supported me.

Then I decided I wanted to start by producing.  I was in Atlanta at the time and I opened the phone book and literally called every single studio in Atlanta until I found someone who was looking for an intern at a studio.

RM:  Where did you go to college?

MM:  I went to a tech school down in Fort Walton Beach, FL to get my MCSE, which is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer degree.  My grandparents lived down there so I stayed with them while I was in school for a year.  The whole time I was playing in bands too.  I was trying to do the band thing while realizing that I wasn’t going to make any money doing that so I needed a fallback career.

RM:  So the networking degree was just a back up?

MM:  Yeah pretty much.  My dad is in computers and it was the logical thing.  I grew up around computers.  In the long run it ended up as a good thing because I use computers to record all the time.  It is good to have extra knowledge on that.

RM:  Did you learn anything from the degree that you can use now?

MM:  Umm… No. (laughs) Not at all.  It was more about learning a specific thing in networking.

RM:  Do you look back and wish you went to school for music engineering?

MM:  I don’t know about going to school for music engineering.  I have friends that went to Full Sail for engineering and with those schools you get whatever you want to get out of it.  Some people will go that are not passionate about the career and don’t get much out of it.  The way that I learned how to do everything was self-taught.  Staying up until four in the morning reading engineering handbooks and watching videos about Pro Tools.  Also, interning at a studio.  So if I would have went to a music school knowing that was my career then I probably would have learned more.

I really wish I had gone to school and majored in music theory just to get the basics.  That all just came with the territory of producing music and learning as you go.

RM:  When the producer in New York wanted to give you an Associate Producer credit did that spark your interest in producing?

MM:  It kind of was.  Some bands that I’ve worked with I found myself in the same shoes as them where you are in the studio and one guy from the band will have an interest in recording.  Three people I still keep in touch with from bands that I’ve recorded will email me with questions about Pro Tools and recording.  It is almost like a long distance mentoring.  You see the same thing in someone else and want to help them and encourage them.  The moment in New York gave me confidence when a professional producer was saying that I could do this.

RM:  What’s the most important thing you learned when you had to go through the yellow pages to call every studio in town?

MM:  I‘ve had people call me and ask, “Are you hiring anyone? Can you use an intern?”  Most of the time I say no but there have been a couple people that have been so persistent I couldn’t say no.  Not only that they were so persistent but also they proved themselves by saying, “well I could do this for you.  I’ve done this before.”  They came over to the studio and said, “listen, let me mow your grass for you and then I can watch you mix.  I really want to see how you do things.”  That’s what I did too.  I called every single person.  Instead of being discouraged when 99% of the people said no, when one person said, “well the grass needs to be cut at our studio if you want to come do that and you can hang around” that kept me going.  I was so persistent with that studio that I got hired on after interning.  Then I was hired on as an assistant engineer then an engineer.  The only way I would have gotten that is by never stopping.  In this industry, for producing and engineering, it is so tough that if you don’t go above and beyond the call of duty you honestly will not make it anywhere.  You have to prove yourself.

RM:  What was the name of the studio you started at?

MM:  It was called The Zone.  The funny thing was that it was a rap studio.  When I started working there it was right when Lil Jon blew up, then the Ying Yang Twins.  I started off as an intern making $150 a week and tried to prove myself.  Then finally something happened with one of the engineers and he got fired.  All of a sudden my boss said, “hey Matt we have a session with Lil Jon and Ying Yang Twins tonight and the other engineer is no longer here. You’re up.”  My first engineering session was working with these guys.  The guy that I worked for was a big mixer for rap songs on the radio.  Working under him I learned about mixing and slowly started doing that.

I eventually got really sick of being in a room with ten rappers smoking blunts and doing shots of tequila.  I finally quit that studio and borrowed some money from a friend to start my own studio.

RM:  When did you start your studio Marigolds and Monsters?

MM:  It was seven or eight years ago.  I had all the knowledge of being in a band and recording before.  In the rap studio I got all the technical knowledge of being an engineer and how to mix and run a session.  I knew that if I could borrow some money and get a little bit of gear that I could start my own studio.  I quit the rap studio and my wife wasn’t sure if I was going to make any money or not.  We were also getting in debt by borrowing money and getting the studio equipment.  The next year I would call every band that I knew and ask everyone to come to Atlanta and record.  I would give them a really good deal.  Eventually people started calling me, which was a change because I started out by calling bands myself.

RM:  What was important to have in your studio when it was built?

MM:  As far as gear goes, it is pretty cheap these days for a decent Pro Tools set up.  One of the records I did, which people still come to me for, is Lydia’s record called Illuminate.  I did that record on a 002, which is about a $700 piece of gear.  Right now I have a Pro Tools HD 3 set up and that runs about $15,000.  Honestly, I think if you have somewhat of a decent Pro Tools set up and at least one good vocal mic, enough mics to do drums, decent pre-amps you’ll be ok.  I probably recorded the Illuminate album with $10,000 worth of gear.  It wasn’t a huge studio set up.  If you are starting out it is more important to know what you are doing and be able to say, “this song isn’t very good, maybe we should try this.”  You need to have good knowledge on how to run a session.  It’s all about how you use the gear.

RM:  How else did you learn besides interning and reading?

MM:  You have to be able to fake it too.  I learned how to use Pro Tools really efficiently when I interned. That’s one good thing about being able to intern with someone because you can see how that person, who has been doing it for years and years, does it.  You can watch and absorb that information on where to place the mic, how to set the track up, how to overdub, etc.  A lot of times the things I needed to know I didn’t know.  I pretended like I knew.  We would be in the middle of session and the band would ask to do something specific.  I didn’t know how to do it but I faked my way through it and as you fake your way through it you learn how to.

Even now, I just got done doing a rap album.  Leighton, from Lydia, and I just co-produced the album and wrote the music for it.  I don’t know much about rap besides engineering the vocals back in the day.  This guy asked us to produce his rap album and write for him.  Instead of saying, “hey I don’t know how to” I said, “sure come on down and we’ll write a rap album for you.”  It actually turned out really cool.  Don’t be afraid if you don’t know how to do something.  You will not learn if you are physically doing it.

RM:  What has your relationship been like with bands and labels?  For example, you did all the albums for Rookie of the Year.  Did you get those jobs through the band or did their label One Eleven contract you for the job?

MM:  With those guys I just got hit up by the band.  That was one of my first breaks recording them.  Ryan, the singer, is a good friend and he convinced their label to let me record them.  I worked my ass off to make a good record.  The band kept coming back for their next albums.  They would tell the label they wanted to go to Atlanta to record with me.  One Eleven liked how Rookie’s albums sounded and sent me more bands to record.  That is how it happened with different labels too.  You work with a label and they see that you do a good job on one project then they trust you to do another band and so on.  As long as you do the best you can, a lot of bands will keep coming back to you.  Same deal with the labels.  They like when you stay on budget and give them a great record.

RM:  Is there a specific genre you like working with the most?

MM:  Lately I have really been getting into electronic and pop music and maybe it is because I have been doing rock and indie rock for so long.  Recently I had a chance to work with some pop bands including Relient K.  I also worked on a beat for Jesse McCartney.  Then Leighton and me did The Cinema, which is really electronic music.  We also did some rap stuff along the same lines.  It is more fulfilling for me to create a beat or track and have just one or two other artists in the studio then having a whole rock band and having to deal with the issues that come with five guys in a room arguing about something.

RM:  I know you produced the first Tides of Man album Empire Theory, did you also produce Tillian Pearson’s upcoming album?  From the clips he posted it seems that he is going the electronic route too.

MM:  Yeah, for sure.  I did the first Tides of Man album and then they went with someone else for the second one.  Tillian, the lead singer, and I stayed in touch.  He heard The Cinema record that Leighton and I did and hit me up about helping him with a pop project.  He liked the sound of The Cinema and wanted something similar.  He came to Atlanta and had two or three songs in demo form and we recorded eight songs and wrote most of them from scratch.  He told me the direction he wanted to go in and we both sat there and came up with the beats.

RM:  Let’s say an artist comes to you with not much prepared.  How do you guide the writing to help cater the artist’s specific sound when you work with so many different genres?

MM:  Everyone has a specific sound.  A lot of times when I co-write with someone I’ll throw in my ideas, which might be similar to other ideas I throw out with artists, but what makes a difference is the way the person I’m writing with interacts with it.  I could throw out an idea and record a beat with Leighton of The Cinema and he would take it and make something different.  With TIllian the process was very similar.  I would write a structure for a song and give it to him and he would come back and say, “lets change this and add this on.”  It is not really me thinking how I should write for someone else, but more about me putting my ideas out there to that person I am writing with.  Then they can turn it into their style.  You can hear what Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic does.  He writes and produces his music and also wrote the song Halo for Beyonce along with songs for Kelly Clarkson.  You can hear his influence in their songs but the artists will take it in their direction.

RM:  Could you explain to everyone the difference between producing, mixing and engineering?

MM:  This took me awhile to figure out.  I would always wonder what the difference between the engineer and the producer was.  I feel that the engineer is someone who knows all the gear, knows exactly how to find a guitar tone that someone needs and he would have enough knowledge to have everything sounding great.  An engineer could say, “Ok if I use this mic, and this pre amp I could make the guitar part sound awesome.”  The producer is someone who comes in and says, “should that even be a guitar part? Maybe that should be a keyboard part. What if we don’t even use a guitar in this song? Let’s change the chord and make it sound like this. Did you think about changing the key?”  The engineer will take what has been decided and make it sound the best it could possibly sound.  Then a mixer is someone who will take the final track and will then put their spin on it.  I’m mixing two records right now and I haven’t even seen the band.  Someone else recorded it and then it was sent to me.  A mixer will take what the producer/band had in mind and make it the best that it could sound for their vision.

RM:  When you first started producing was it hard to flat out say to bigger bands if something in a recording wasn’t working?

MM:  There are definitely egos that come along with bands that are bigger.  Even if a band has been around for a long time they might be hesitant to listen to you.  I remember when I was working with Train.  I used to listen to them in high school and then I found myself sitting behind the mixing board with them.  The singer is in his forties and I’m this younger guy; it was kind of intimidating to look up and tell somebody, “you know what, that take sucked. Can you do it again?”  If an artist is good they can realize that you both are working together for the same end product.  I’ve worked with people that have bigger names than me and they are completely open because they take my ideas as valid because they respected me.  If two people have a mutual respect then you both are going to listen each other to get the best outcome.

RM:  Do you have any stories, without calling bands out, about complete disasters for people to avoid when going into the studio?

MM:  There have been a couple bands I’ve worked with that fought amongst themselves and just could not agree.  It becomes a disaster because maybe the band thinks the guitar player should play a certain part but they are afraid to say it to him.  Then when they come into the studio it blows up and results in a fight.  This always wastes time and the recording progress is halted because of it.  If you go into the studio make sure you are on the same page as everyone else in the band.  I can always tell a session will go bad if I’m talking to one member of the band and he says, “listen I should probably tell you beforehand, our guitar player kind of has an ego and he might be hard to deal with.”  Then they come into the studio and everyone knows there is a problem and it unravels during the recording time.  You have to sometimes walk on eggshells because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.

There have been a couple bands I had in the studio where the label pays for it so the band does not have to.  The problem with this is that when the band isn’t paying for it they sometimes look at this time as a big party.  The band will show up to the studio three hours late, hung over, and no one wants to work.  Another problem I’ve come across are when bands try to hook up with girls in the studio and then there are girls just hanging around.  Thankfully that only happens with one out of every six or seven bands.

RM:  The recent album The Season by the band All Get Out is by far one of my favorite recordings.  Would you mind going through the process of recording the album?

MM:  All Get Out, I love those guys.  They are some of my favorite people.  I’ve been friends with them for awhile and we have been talking about making that record for probably a year before we made it.  There was a lot of thought beforehand that went into the album.  The way we did it with them, and I don’t do this with every band, was the weekend before we started recording we went up to a cabin in the mountains.  I brought my laptop and we went through all the songs that we were set to record and we did pre-production.  We cut the songs that we didn’t think were strong enough and the ones we thought were strong enough we carefully listened to the structure of them.  We rearranged some and I would say, “well maybe this song needs a better chorus.”  We talked about the songs rather then just getting into the studio and putting things down right away.  We had a good chance with this album to truly think about everything before recording.

After that weekend and we picked all the songs we wanted, we came back and spent a good week on drums.  We made sure that if one song needed really hard, really fast drums we would mic it a certain way.  We would arrange it in the room a certain way.  There are a couple songs that have roomy background drums and I had my drum tech, Lane, play a kit off in the other side of the room.  Gordon was playing the drums and Lane would come back and play extra drums behind him just to add another layer.  We really thought hard about how to set the drums up.

This is the way I normally do records by knocking out the drums and then lay down the scratch guitar and vocals so we knew where everything was.  We spent a lot of time getting the right tones for everything.  If something sounded like it needed a weird tone or the guitar needed to sound like it was underwater or split off into a stereo channel we would spend the time on it.  One of the guitars on a track had a mic upstairs and had one mic downstairs.  One song had a part where bottles were shattering so we all had bottles and went outside.  We set up mics outside and you can hear a bunch of bottles shattering against the wall.  Instead of just setting up the drums and saying, “ok we are going to record ten songs in a row and not move the mics,” we figured out what every song needed instead of recording going to the next one, then recording going to the next one, and so on.  We thought, “what if this has an organ here instead of a guitar… what if this has double drums that pan from left to right… if the song is about this maybe we should make sure the feeling and the tones will reflect what the lyrics are about.”

We had time at the end for Nate, the singer, to work even more on vocals.  We fixed some of the choruses to make them catchier.  He would stay the night at the studio and I would set up a mic for him and he knows how to use Pro Tools.  In the middle of the night we would be re-writing a chorus and the next day he would show it to me.  Sometimes we would re-write it again and sometimes he nailed it.  Nate’s songwriting is amazing and that record was a blast to make.  I hope The Season gets the recognition it deserves.

That album and Illuminate are my two favorites that I worked on.  With both of those albums the songs are really good, everyone got along great, and we had enough time to really think about what we needed to do instead of rushing through the recording process.

RM:  Any other additional advice you want to give to people looking into recording, engineering and/or mixing as a career?

MM:  If you are trying to get into this field as a career the main thing over anything else is persistence.  This isn’t something like when you are in college you think, “oh well, maybe I’ll be an accountant or maybe I’ll get into computers. “  You have to have such a passion and such a drive that you are able to be turned done like twenty to thirty times by studios and still have the passion to say you are not going to give up.  If I had given up after applying to a couple different studios I would have never made it.  Even if you can get your way into interning at a studio you are not going to be able to move up until you prove yourself and that you are dedicated to it.

One bad thing about this industry is that you have to work really late hours.  Like tonight I started recording really early and when I get off the phone with you (11 PM) I have to record vocals.  You work 12-16 hour days.  On top of that you have to have the self-motivation to research, watch YouTube videos, watch tutorials and keep learning.  If you are interning at a studio there is only so much that you ask the engineer during a session.  You need to know enough ahead of time in able to absorb what’s happening.  The main thing I would say is being motivated to listen to records, read about different people that make records, how they made them and get that knowledge.

Thank you again to Matt for his time.  Make sure to check out his group The Cinema on Spotify.  Do yourself a favor though and skip the Spotify step and just buy the album here.

Check out some of Matt’s work:

The Cinema

Lydia

All Get Out

Tides of Man

]]> http://artroomcollective.com/wondercon-2012-photo-journal/feed/ 0 http://artroomcollective.com/missed-music-monday-beta-band/ http://artroomcollective.com/missed-music-monday-beta-band/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:36:44 +0000 Rob Marcacci http://artroomcollective.com/?p=832 I was all set to start writing my Missed Out Music Monday on Slick Shoes’ album Far From Nowhere and then I checked Twitter.  I noticed a tweet from the band Beta State and clicked their page to check them out.  Their page mentioned a video for their cover of the Bjork song Unravel.  Taking on Bjork could have been a huge mistake but their cover is very moving.  Bjork’s song opens with what sounds like a saxophone and a layer of looped electronic sounds.  Then within the last thirity seconds there is an organ that carries out the song before an abrupt ending.  The Beta State did a great job of taking this song and creating something that could stand alone as their original track.  The intro features an ambient guitar over slow paced drums that lead into a goose bump induced chorus.  The chorus originally in Bjork’s track features duel vocals by, none other than, herself.  In Beta State’s video there are four women singing the chorus but it definitely sounds more like a choir.

Check out the song and video for yourself:

The original by Bjork:

After listening to their take on Unravel, I don’t know about five times, I decided to check out their new EP on Spotify. I heard the first track and just bought the damn thing.  The chorus on the first track, Start A Clean Slate, gave me goosebumps.  I wanted to know more about the band and when I read that guitarist/vocalist Ryan Hernandez and drummer Adrian Robison were previously in the band Strata I was sold.  I always loved their S/T album that was released back in 2004.  It definitely has a different style than Beta State but after a few listens you can tell it’s the same guys behind the wheel.  Here were a couple singles released off the S/T album.

The last album Strata released, The End Of The World, sounded more along the lines of Dredg in comparison to their previous releases.

Beta State’s new EP, #Friendship, immediately starts off by demanding your attention within the first ten seconds of Start A Clean Slate.   The beginning of the track sounds like the song Walk Away by Mad at Gravity and then shifts into vocal bliss with Matt McDonald.  The last time I was this excited about a new vocalist was, and I know I shouldn’t be saying this, Jonny Craig.  Another stand out track on the album is Carry You.  The guitarist uses the same style from their Bjork cover and it works perfectly with the bridge in the song.

There are hints of Strata throughout the album but the ambient guitar is more reminiscent of Explosions In The Sky and Angels and Airwaves.   The influences come out in the music but Beta State has a sound that is distinctly their own.  Start by checking out the Bjork Unravel cover and then listen to Start A Clean Slate.  The difference in the two tracks shows how almost effortless it is for the band to effectively cross between genres.

Check out the #Friendship EP on Spotify.

Also, if you live in the Bay area make sure you get a ticket to their show with Dredg this week.  Dredg will be playing Catch Without Arms in its entirety and I cannot be there…  Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.