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Legendary producer, songwriter, and educator !llmind, tells the story of sending beats to Kanye and the moment he learned one had made the grade.

“It was one of those moments where preparation and opportunity meet”. At the time making five to ten beats a day, !llmind has a tireless work ethic. So, when the call from rapper Rhymefest that he was with Kanye and needed beats came through, !llmind was ready, sending dozens of beats for the session.

Full transcript:

“I think that was one of those moments where preparation and opportunity met.

In 2010, I created an album, and one of the rap features on that album was a rapper named Rhymefest. And then around 2011, he hit me up and he was like ‘Yo !llmind, do you have any beats? I’m with Kanye.’ And I was like ‘Absolutely!’.

Thankfully, I was prepared due to the fact that I’d just been making beats every day, you know, like five to 10 beats every single day, like non-stop, no sleep.

So I sent him like 30 or 40 beats, and then one of them ended up getting in the studio. Then he recorded it and you know, he texted me like ‘Yo, Raekwon just jumped on the song.’ And then he was like ‘Yo, Pusha T’s on the song. I was like ‘oh shit, this is actually happening’.

Diving into it too, I think what helped me in that moment was not overthinking. The beat that Kanye chose, I did not expect at all. Those melody and synth lines, I never knew were ‘Kanye sounding’.

From there, it was kind of like ‘okay, I’m headed to like the next phase of my career’.
Matt Genovese takes us through some of the amazing gear he’s cultivated through the years, picking out the choicest pieces in his collection and taking us through the kit he would save in a worst-case scenario.

If a fire broke out in your studio space and you could only save five pieces of gear what would you save?

We knew the question we had to ask, when we visited producer and songwriter Matthew Genovese at his drool-worth analog studio in LA.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

“I’m responsible engineer and I have backups that stay in my computer. And then I have another backup that I do every day.

Then I take it out of my studio and put it in my house, in case my studio burned down. so I wouldn’t have to grab a hard drive or a computer.

I would grab my Stevie Ray Vaughan Strat that I’ve done all my hours on, and my Martin OM-28 V. That’s two.

I would probably wheel out my tape machine, my Scully 280 And then maybe my Oberheim OB-8 and the DMX drum machine.

Those are replaceable, but it would be hard to replace. Everything else I think insurance would cover and I could find.”
With Halloween around the corner, we’re asking the best in the business for their #HorrorStories. First up to the plate is two-time Grammy-nominated engineer Teezio.

Every pro has one – the unwavering memory of a mistake too big to forget.

#HorrorStories brings these memories to the surface, as the world’s biggest producers, songwriters and engineers unveil the most outlandish blunders of their careers — providing a much-needed reminder that even the greats make mistakes.

Full Transcript:

“There’s a really big fuckup that goes like beyond the average fuckup. And it wasn’t entirely my fault. But you could say that it is the engineers fault to make sure.

There was a thing a long time ago that UNICEF did where everyone was singing John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. So I recorded a bunch of actors, David Arquette just his daughter, like all these people like all these famous actors, everything is being filmed as they’re recording, right?

So guess what? The audio somehow has to line up to the video. So usually with Pro Tools, if the interface is capturing at one sample rate 48k and the Pro Tools session is at 44k, you’ll get some sort of error automatically Pro Tools will tell you ‘hey, you need to change it’. Cool.

There’s one converter in New York and I’ll never forget it. It was at Jungle City Studios. This thing did not communicate with Pro Tools. Everything sounds fine in Pro Tools. But then when I started making the renders to give to the video people they’re like, ‘dude all of this is off sync. How could it be off sync?’ The assistant opens the closet and the converter says 48k and we literally had to throw everything away. We couldn’t use any of it.”
Jesse Ray Ernster’s rise has not been without a few bumps along the way, which he shares with us in this brutally honest edition of #HorrorStories.

With a Grammy win and over a billion streams to his name, it’s safe to say that Jesse is one of the top mixers in the industry, but the journey has not always been so smooth.

Full transcript:

“I’ve lost like hundreds of gigs by overstepping you know, the bounds of their intention and their desire sonically.

I had this thing for a while where I would send the first pass like, ‘Hey, this is my liberty pass, I took some liberties, I threw in some ideas, I really think that this takes the song to the next level, like dynamically, this improves the record. And you can either take some of the ideas, or we could just put it back, I’ll put it back. And I’ll just give you the mix that I think you probably want.’ I would do that a lot.

I think that first pass just scares people and they’re like ‘No, this is this is wrong. This isn’t the song we made’. I mean, my life could look way different. If I had gotten that gig, and it’s just not the way to look at it.

So the encouraging message to anybody else out there is like, you get some W’s get some L’s, like you win some, you lose some.

The coolest thing about losing a gig is when the mix comes out. You can stack your mix up against theirs, and listen and try to deconstruct what that individual did to those files in order to get it to knock the way it did. And that is extremely educational. This is a universal principle to it’s not just about mixing or career. It’s life. If you’re not learning from the L’s, you’re not looking at it the right way.”
Producer and Mix Engineer MixedByJocelin showcases his #AllStarMixTricks for upping the energy of Drill and Trap beats.

Sometimes it can be the simplest techniques that help to bring your mixes over the line.

Pulling up the original Logic project for his mix for the Clavish freestyle on Kenny Allstar’s YouTube series ‘The Generals Corner’, MixedByJocelin demonstrates how b-cuts can be used to build energy.

Full transcript:

“My name is MixedByJocelin and my Mix Trick is adding beat cuts. Let me show you.

I took the first hit of the beat, but I’ve cut the group totally and I’ve simply copied and pasted it two times in front of it .

This is going to give us like almost like a DJ queue effect so it’s like ‘boom boom’ before it drops in, which is going to build energy and bring more of a vibe to the song.”
Producer and songwriter Matthew Genovese revisits the moment when he learnt the importance of backing up your projects first-hand.

“I was freaking out!”. The saying goes that your work isn’t backed up until it’s backed up twice.

Having completed a recording session with a Toronto-based artist in his LA studio, Genovese recalls when he went to master the tracks and discovered the whole project was missing.

Full Transcript:

“I still don’t really know what happened. I did a song with an artist and the artist was from Toronto. They flew here and we did a session. We wrote the song and I sent them the demo at the end of the day.

Then like, three, four months later, they call me and they’re like, ‘hey, we want to release the record, we want you to finish it and mix it.’ And I was like, ‘okay, great’. I sat down on my computer and tried to open up the session and it was not on my computer and I could not find it anywhere. The whole file of the artist was not there and I was kind of freaking out.

I think my time machine was set in a way where it was using the wrong master drive. So it was replacing all of the things on my master drive with the things on the backup drive. So it deleted that stuff. But luckily, I had the fire safe drive in my house that I backup all the time and take out of the studio just in case of a fire. And so I ran in the house and plugged that in and luckily the session was there. The artists never found out about it, and I was saved.”
Mixing engineer Bainz looks back on one of the defining #HorrorStories from the early days of his career, sharing his approach for remedying an obscure glitch that was out of his control.

“This is probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me in a session environment”. It can be tough being the youngest or least experienced in the room on a session – if something goes wrong, the suspicion is that it’s your fault, whatever the truth of the matter. That said, if you navigate the situation correctly, you can turn into a major win.

Full transcript:

“It’s crazy because it happened very early into my career. The main engineer at that studio had gone on vacation. We were recording and we were working, doing a lot of stuff. Somehow at some point, they had installed a printer at the studio. The printer software was contacting HP that caused some glitch.

Anyway, none of the audio files that were being recorded were getting saved. Halfway through something happened and it eventually crashed. And when we opened it back, nothing was there. I’m like, ‘yo, what is going on?’

What saved me in that moment was while we recorded we were vocaligning as we went along, so I went into the committed files folder found those vocalign regions, flew them on the grid, pieced the song back together, in the early days as engineer, whilst everyone in the room blamed me for something because I was a new engineer.

It was so easy to blame me. Luckily, that tech came in and told us that’s what happened and then it went from ‘wow, you fucked up’ to ‘wow, I can’t believe you actually figured that situation and navigated through it.’”
Multi-platinum recording and mix engineer Bainz (Young Thug, Gunna, YSL, Machine Gun Kelly, Sia, Post Malone) is no stranger to the grind.

Graduating as a valedictorian from Full Sail University, Bainz has risen through the ranks of hip hop and trap and become known as Young Thug and YSL’s go-to mixer.

In this instalment of #TilYouMakeIt, Bainz tells the story behind the creation of the legendary compilation album ‘Slime Language 2’.

Stacked to the brim with all-star collaborators and faced with the pressure of extremely tight deadlines, he reveals his strategy for coordinating with the vocal engineers for each featured rapper and piecing together the final record just hours before its scheduled release.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

“Right up until the last second we were like ‘oh, the song with Drake got approved an hour ago, Thug wants him on the album mix it in like 30 minutes and send it to mastering.’ That kind of pressure!

Slime Language 2 was, it was crazy, Thug was like ‘we’re going to Atlanta to work on this compilation album’. He wanted every artists on the label to be on it. And it was crazy.

It was like a performance every day. We did it between LA and Atlanta. But there were so many artists in and out, the biggest challenge of that record was because there’s so many artists, everyone had their own different vocal tone.

It was cool because we there was a group of us engineers, but I had to like oversee putting it all together and I wasn’t just tracking it. I was mixing the whole thing or deciding like ‘Okay, cool: This person can mix this song, but I was delivering the whole project. It was a lot of experience really quick. Songs kept coming on till the last minute I delivered the last song like three hours before the album came out.

Just the excitement in the air those days was just amazing. It really felt like I was a part of like something cool.”
Go-to mixer and engineer for Young Thug and Gunna breaks down his process in the final 10% of getting a mix ready for mastering.

It’s a perennial problem: How do you know when your mix is done? We caught up with Bainz, in his room at Crosby Recording Studios to discover his answer to this question.

“When I’m done at the end, and I think I’m at a good place, I’ll still go through and listen to the song. I’ll make minor vocal automations within a dB up and down, I’ll add small minute throws here and there. Small finishing things that like take that one step forward.”

Once the mix is sounding good in his room, he then begins to test the mix across multiple devices. This is where LISTENTO enters the picture.

“When I’m actually making those EQ decisions, it sounds really good in my room. But I don’t know if anyone’s going to hear that on a small speaker. That’s what I check on on different sources. The way I do it is I just have Audiomovers app running on my phone and I swap between Airpods and the car really quick. I have the session playing over here. While I’m walking, I’m checking on my Airpods. By the time I get into the car, without me even thinking about it, I’ve heard three different playback methods that are outside of my studio with Pro Tools still being open and I haven’t even bounced it yet.”

WatchBainz episode of #AllStarMixTricks
Stem mastering engineer at Abbey Road Studios Oli Morgan shares the secret final test he uses to ensure his mixes are release ready, whilst also helping to keep his hearing in check.

Protecting your hearing long-term is essential for longevity in your career. Having made a name for himself working on projects for the likes of Bastille, Elton John and FKJ, this is something Oli Morgan knows all too well.

“Don’t listen to stuff too loud” he begins when asked to reveal his mix tricks:

“As you turn stuff up, the way that your ears respond changes, so you actually get more inaccurate as you turn stuff up.”

Revealing his process for signing off his mixes, he continues:

“When I’ve finished working on everything, my last test is to put it really quiet and if it gives you the same feeling as it does when you’ve got it cranked, but you haven’t got it cranked, then you know it’s finished. Because it feels like it’s loud. It feels it feels right. But you’re not killing your ears.”

Watch the full #AllStarMixTricks episode:

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Legendary producer, songwriter, and educator !llmind, tells the story of sending beats to Kanye and the moment he learned one had made the grade.

Full transcript:

Matt Genovese takes us through some of the amazing gear he’s cultivated through the years, picking out the choicest pieces in his collection and taking us through the kit he would save in a worst-case scenario.

With Halloween around the corner, we’re asking the best in the business for their #HorrorStories. First up to the plate is two-time Grammy-nominated engineer Teezio.

Jesse Ray Ernster’s rise has not been without a few bumps along the way, which he shares with us in this brutally honest edition of #HorrorStories.

Producer and Mix Engineer MixedByJocelin showcases his #AllStarMixTricks for upping the energy of Drill and Trap beats.

Full transcript:

Producer and songwriter Matthew Genovese revisits the moment when he learnt the importance of backing up your projects first-hand.

Full Transcript:

Mixing engineer Bainz looks back on one of the defining #HorrorStories from the early days of his career, sharing his approach for remedying an obscure glitch that was out of his control.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO

TRANSCRIPT

Go-to mixer and engineer for Young Thug and Gunna breaks down his process in the final 10% of getting a mix ready for mastering.

“When I’m done at the end, and I think I’m at a good place, I’ll still go through and listen to the song. I’ll make minor vocal automations within a dB up and down, I’ll add small minute throws here and there. Small finishing things that like take that one step forward.”

WatchBainz episode of #AllStarMixTricks

Stem mastering engineer at Abbey Road Studios Oli Morgan shares the secret final test he uses to ensure his mixes are release ready, whilst also helping to keep his hearing in check.