Never forget that Rick James was a really good producer, kidnapper, and torturer. He probably Sheila E’d Murphy into being able to nail a performance that quickly. ;)
I am unrelated ‘family’ to one of the Mary Jane Girls and they did not have it good, even after his death.
What did you think Masego was faking?
that one man could produce this quality of music on that little machine he’s got
He never really showed the machine, but yes, everything on music like that can be done within the box to a professional standard because of how accessible music has been made by programs like Ableton. Back in the day, you had to get that stuff recorded in and it was almost all crappy until you really effed with it (and the people using that stuff all could really really play it and manipulate it into something awesome). Now every patch artists play on a keyboard is practically mix ready (minus maybe drums and some bass stuff), meaning you could be a horrible musician with no ear and still make something resembling professional quality with synths.
I mixed a synth project using authentic 80s synths a few years ago, and it was an absolute nightmare. Those things had all sorts of inherent issues you couldn’t hear (and that they didn’t record to tape back then) that create major issues when you stack them one on top of the other (30 Hz bumps mainly). I know how to deal with it now, but I got scared and dialed myself back from what I wanted it to be because of the issues. I’ll never be happy with how the project turned out. If the artist used emulations of everything he did, it would have been super simple to work with.
For the Masego video, I think he did that whole thing live (fed split into a workstation so he could mix it later), because it all looks too convincing to be lip synched. The reverb he added when he started singing into the 87 is the only contrived thing about it, but it sounds like the microphone (that’s a $3200 min microphone, by the way, so he knows what he’s doing and has a budget or someone behind the scenes on him does). Short answer, yes he could easily have done that, but because you’re not looking completely behind the scenes it’s impossible to know what he actually used in the recording/mixing stage (the high end microphone leads you to believe that he was working in a serious studio). By the way, that’s probably the microphone that Party All the Time was really recorded on.
Is that a synth, or a control surface for synthesizers?
Both. With a sampler and as of the beta testing update, a looper also. Can control modular synth stuff also.
Is that $899 price tricked out, or do you have to do a bunch of add ons to get it up to a really high level?
That’s what I paid for it. I love it. Wait, I paid a bit less because I got in for the kickstarter a few years ago.
Looks really good, is that what Masego is using?
No clue. I googled some stuff and didn’t see his equipment. The box comment made me post that haha.
They only show it from the side, but I’d believe it’s that or something very similar to it.
Do you own Arturia V? An artist who was big in the 80s told me their emulations of the old synths are basically perfect and that it would be pointless to use the real synthesizers when that exists.
I do. I installed it this spring right before my busy season got started and haven’t really done much with any of it though. Winter is when I spend most of my time in my studio messing around and stuff.
There are some good reviews of it on Youtube. Also have an Arturia Keystep.
ETA: I can set any VST up in Ableton and control it via the Deluge also if I want to. Or drum racks or instrument racks, etc.
wtf
Do you want to post anything you’ve mixed?
That’s not my setup. I wish haha. I’m gong to start an instagram that isn’t tied to my name one of these days and then will share stuff.
I’ve been neck deep in this for like 8-9 months. I had to dig my self away to do things on actual hardware over the last winter. I am trying not to buy a ton of modular stuff until I know what I want and VCV Rack is great for being able to try modules. I’ve spent a bunch on paid modules there too though lmao.
No, I know, and that’s a pretty good endorsement for Deluge.
I’d like this thread to be about analyzing work that can actually be manipulated or changed, because that’s more fun than talking about stuff that other people do and its worth, though that’s obviously something that can be talked about. By going over work that any of us have done, it’s a way for people to learn and possibly pick up some new techniques along the way.
In the meantime, talk a little about the kind of stuff you do. Do you write, produce, mix, all of the above? What genres, etc.?
I could mix them better than their producers now from listening to the sound they provide on the videos but if I put something out there as work for someone I’d want to practice and be a lot more confident in my work than I currently am.
That’s interesting that you had to play instruments as part of your degree. That was definitely not part of mine.
I did my internship at Cherokee Studios in West Hollywood, and it was plenty to make me say I never wanted to work in the music business full time. The first Coolio album was being done there when I was interning (there were a few other things going on but I can’t remember what now). The rite of passage for people moving up there was working with David Lynch, but when my turn came up I had to take finals and couldn’t do it.
By the time the internship was over, I just wasn’t willing to be a 3.35 an hour glorified janitor for however long it took to move up. Almost every kid who worked there had rich parents, and assistants were chosen for proximity to the studio over skill. One guy had an assistant gig lined up, and he was like, nah, I wanna finish college first. He turned out to be a super racist so fk him anyway.
My only good memory was that toward the end of the internship, a guy named Matthew Ellard was just coming up in engineering and he knew what kind of music I was into. He actually asked me to help him set up mics in the big studio studio there, and if I’d stuck around it’s possible I might have gotten to be his assistant at some point as we got along really well. I just went through some of his discography and it was the Deconstruction album I was helping him set up for. I think he moved to Boston at some point.
If anything, I’d say you’re not missing anything by not ever working for a music studio. I think just about anyone who avoided it still works on music for a hobby, and I surely didn’t miss it. Engineering/producing also has a very short life cycle of maybe 5 years unless you’re huge or timeless, so most former music people end up in post anyway. I had said if I wasn’t first engineering in a year I wasn’t interested in doing it for a living (I became a Re-Recording Mixer 9 months into my first job in post). I think I probably had an outside shot at that happening, but it wasn’t worth it and I would have been so poor I would have had to rent an apartment with my mom in L.A. I also lived something like 35 minutes from the studio so I would never have been the first call.
My original goal was to mix hip hop and/or jazz, two genres I really excelled in. Cherokee did a lot of hip hop at that time, so there was a possibility of getting to do that there. I also really enjoy mixing R&B, with my favorite current genre being Neo Soul (never have gotten to mix anything in that genre). On 2+2 you and I had a few discussions about this, but I’ve also mixed some amount EDM as well.
My thing was always that I wanted to mix music very occasionally (it’s way below my standard rate), just to try to keep sharp. I lost that sharpness from probably 1996-2001 when I started working with an artist until maybe 2005 or so. We fell out of touch and started working together again around 2011, I think.
Then, I reached out to a different artist most of my work is for, and asked if he had anything I could just mess around with, because I was bored. He gave me a song he was working on for an EP, that he just couldn’t get to sound good. He liked what I did (I didn’t, but that’s me in general), and it led to me mixing the whole EP. The EP was successful enough that a full album was written. I’d never done a full album before, and there were lots of tech issues with how the drums were recorded. I couldn’t solve them, and I only had 30 days to mix 10 songs. I wasn’t happy at all with the results, though it got some positive reviews for the sound (lol). My entire sound breaks down to the fundamental. If I’m not happy with the fundamental sound (drums, bass, main instrument, vocals), I hate everything about it even if no one else would.
I determined after that experience that I was going to get in the trenches and force myself to become a good music mixer if it was the last thing I did. Of course when I was ready the artist abandoned me to try someone else, and that album got shelved likely because of its quality (though I did ‘audition’ to mix two tracks). I ended up having what I thought was one really good mix of a song, but he had no interest in it from what I could tell though he supposedly liked the way it sounded.
Around that same time, he sent me a song from another group that he wanted to see what I could do with it. There had been a lot of infighting in the band, but they had one really good song. He had done the original mix, and it was decent, but nothing special. When he heard mine he was blown away by it, and tried to pitch it to the band. They said it ‘never sounded better’, but absolutely nothing happened with it.
The artist got divorced after the unreleased album, and his band broke up. He started a new one, and we did a 3 song EP for that one that had pretty good songs on it (and 2 mixes I didn’t hate). It did nothing, their relationship ended, and he went from guitars to synths for his latest band. I mixed the first album, but the mastering made me despondent about its quality, and I have my own versions of the songs now from the same versions that were sent to mastering. The album did not make its money back, and now he mixes everything himself because there’s really no point to paying me if no one’s interested in the stuff (plus everything stays in his vision). I have no idea if we’ll ever work together again on music, but I’ll probably do it if he ever wants to.
I have everything I’ve discussed in this post all the way back to the record sessions, but I lost the original sessions of the mixes due to an encryption situation that I didn’t understand at the time was a really big deal.
