We are thrilled to be joining an impressive line-up of brands to support the audio programming community at the Audio Developer Conference (ADC), taking place online and in-person between 14-16 November in London.
Now in its eighth year, ADC gives audio software engineers a unique opportunity to focus on recent developments, frameworks and audio applications.
Audio innovation is at the very heart of our business, and we are proud to sponsor the event bringing talent together, as well as support the ADC Celebrating Women in Audio initiative.
Come and find us to chat all things tech, streaming and job opportunities with the Audiomovers team (#WeAreHiring).
In time for Halloween, we teamed up !llmind for the finale of #HorrorStories, as he reveals the moment he learnt to make failure his friend.
Having his beats met with indifference by his hero in their first session together, the two-time Grammy award-winner shares how a situation he initially perceived as his greatest failure, became the driving force for the culmination of his success.
Full transcript:
“I was like ‘Fuck, he doesn’t like any of this shit, like, Dre hates my beats’.
Back in 2013, I got a text from a friend of mine. His name’s Tyhiem. And he was like ‘I’m actually up the block from you. I’m with Dr. Dre.’ I did double take on my phone. I was like ‘Dre? Like Dr. Dre? Okay, cool!’
Tyhiem and Dre walk to the studio and he’s like ‘Yo, plug in. Let’s hear some stuff’. I’m playing beats for like 10 minutes and I glance back and I see Dre sitting down on his phone, with his head down, like not moving at all, just bored.
I stopped the music. I turned around and Dre was like ‘Yo ill, your stuff was cool. But it wasn’t anything I haven’t heard before’. I felt like I really failed in that moment.So I went back to the studio and it gave me that extra fuel to go a step further with my music.
A year later, I got a call back from Ty and he was like ‘Yo, we’re in the studio with Dre, he wants you to come over.’ I was like ‘oh shit, perfect’. So I ended up being in the studio with Dre and we ended up recording like three songs.
So it worked out in the end, but it was a super big learning lesson for me and I’ll never forget that.”
Picture this. You’ve produced a track packed with potential to realise you’ve later deleted the entire project. Many may abandon it, however Alina Smith from the production duo, LYRE MUSIC GROUP, proves just why you shouldn’t in her edition of #HorrorStories.
After losing the session files for one of her tracks, she reveals how remaining positive and deciding to rebuild the song from scratch allowed her to achieve a better end result than she initially expected.
Full Transcript
“About a year ago, I wrote this song for a YouTube collaboration. So it was part of a video. And I accidentally deleted the session.
Inever ever do that I have everything backed up like 17 times, but I think it was in the folder with the video files. And I usually, you know, delete old videos that already were posted.
Months later, I looked for it and was like ‘oh, yeah, this was really good. I should like finish this for real as a real song and pitch it to Kpop’ And then I was looking for a session and it was gone. It was not anywhere.
But I asked a collaborator of mine to rebuild the track around the mp3 that I had. And he did such a spectacular job. It ended up being so much better than the original version. You know, something very positive came out of me losing these files and being really upset about it.“
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.’”