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For the Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer and owner of the Nashville-based mastering powerhouse The Hit Lab, Nathan Dantzer (Niall Horan, Teddy Swims, Kelsea Ballerini), trusting your first instincts and leaning into what excites you without letting doubt creep in will always lead to better results. At times this might mean stepping away from personal music taste to instead give the song what it needs and take it where it wants to go.

#MixTricks is where the very best mixers, engineers, producers, and musicians let us in on some of the best secrets tips and tricks they’ve picked up on their way to the top. With LISTENTO from Audiomovers you can stream uncompressed multichannel audio to and from any DAW. Ready to go in five minutes. Just send a link.

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TRANSCRIPT

My name is Nathan Dantzler and my mix trick would be to trust what you feel and lean into it.

Oftentimes people try to explore every single option, but their first instinct was the right one and so if you can get to a point where you trust your first instinct inherently and don’t let doubt creep in, you’ll do better work.

I can only make records sound the way that I feel excited about them. That’s just what we try to do. Just whatever excites me and whatever feels right and I mean, it’s putting your finger to the wind and understanding like, what does this song want? Where does this want to go?

And sometimes disregarding your own taste for that, but ultimately your taste is still in there and what you enjoy. Don’t second guess yourself too much. There’s power in momentum.
In this first episode of #Goosebumps, five-time Grammy Award-winning mixer, engineer, and producer F. Reid Shippen (Kenny Chesney, Ingrid Michaelson, Gloria Gaynor) recalls the various spine-tingling moments that have adorned his career so far.

From pushing up the fader as Steven Tyler’s perfect vocals cascaded through the monitors, filling the room with ‘Janie’s Got a Gun’, to his fulfilling his childhood dreams while working on Star Wars with the London Symphony Orchestra in Abbey Road Studios, these are the moments that gave Reid #Goosebumps.

#Goosebumps is where we ask some of the best producers, engineers and artists about the musical moments that make the hairs stand up on the back of their neck.

With LISTENTO from Audiomovers you can stream uncompressed multichannel audio to and from any DAW. Ready to go in five minutes. Just send a link.

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TRANSCRIPT

You know what’s always kind of a goosebump moment is when you’re out in public, you’re in Target, or in a restaurant, and you hear something and you’re like, this song sounds familiar, I wonder like who this is, and you realize like, oh, I did that. That’s a trick. Like, that’s pretty cool.

I mean, there’s a bunch of them. I got to work with Steven Tyler. I’m mixing the song and I push up the fader and it’s him singing. It was Janie’s Got A Gun, actually. And you’re just like, oh, okay. That’s why he’s Steven Tyler. Like, it’s perfect. It’s perfect. Stuff like that gives me goosebumps.

One of the things that I do every once in a while is stuff for Disney. As a kid born in the late 70s, Star Wars is a big part of my life. And there have been one or two times where part of the show was, uh, the London Symphony Orchestra in Abbey Road playing the Star Wars theme.

And, like, that is just… It’s as good as it gets. Takes you back to when you were like, five years old, six years old, seeing this movie for the first time.

Like, that’s always goosebumps.
Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling mix engineer Jeff Braun (Jason Aldean, Elle King, Nelly) takes us behind the scenes on #TheMakingOf the mix of Jason Aldean’s 6x platinum-certified single ‘You Make It Easy’.

What started out as a one-off opportunity for Jeff from Michael Knox, the music publishing executive, multi-platinum producer and President of Peermusic Nashville, has now evolved into four Jason Aldean albums, multiple number-one hits, and a level of confidence and credibility that has helped establish Jeff Braun as one of the most sought-after mixing engineers in mainstream country music industry.

#TheMakingOf is where producers, engineers and mixers lift the hood on their biggest hits, taking us behind the stems within the original sessions.

With LISTENTO from Audiomovers you can stream uncompressed multichannel audio to and from any DAW. Ready to go in five minutes. Just send a link.

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TRANSCIPT

My first number one was Jason Aldean, ‘You Make It Easy’. That was a big deal. That was a big song and it was a big song for Jason as an artist. I think it’s four times platinum now.

I’ve been mixing a lot for Peer, a publisher in town, but I’ve been doing like sync side stuff for them. Michael Knox, I think heard stuff and then he just gave me a shot on one and he was like, ‘Hey, just take a stab at it’. And then he was like, ‘okay, this is, this is cool. Can you do another one?’ There’s another one.

And then I think he was still unsure, like, are you just getting lucky, or do we have something here? And then I think he sent, like, two more. I did two more and then he was like, ‘OK, you’ve got the record. Let’s do this whole thing together’. And then that was five or six years ago or something like that. I think that brought some credibility, because he’s like an A list artist.

So it just brought confidence in other people sending stuff, where it’s like, Oh, okay, yeah, he kind of does stuff with everybody. Like, yeah, we’ll send him this and see how it goes.

And that was like my first real break into the mainstream country scene. And it was like, alright, here we go.
In this first episode of #OffTheRecord, we are joined by Chuck Ainlay, the music producer, recording engineer and mixer known for his Grammy-winning and multi-platinum-selling work with iconic acts like Peter Frampton, Dire Straits and Taylor Swift.

In this conversation, Chuck reveals how a personal recommendation from Nashville steel player Paul Franklin helped him land the dream gig of working with Dire Straits.

From what at first seemed like a rocky start, Chuck would go on to build a deep and productive creative partnership and friendship with Mark Knopfler, with the two working together across multiple solo projects over the years. This is the moment where it all began.

With LISTENTO from Audiomovers you can stream uncompressed multichannel audio to and from any DAW. Ready to go in five minutes. Just send a link.

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TRANSCRIPT

They were like the biggest band in the world at the time. I mean, they had had the biggest album ever. They had had the biggest tour ever. And this was like the next album. So pretty intense for me.

I was working on a record here in Nashville. It was behind schedule and I get a phone call. I pick up the phone and it’s, this guy’s got like this really extravagant English accent. But I thought it was a friend kind of playing a prank on me, you know? And I said, listen, I’m too busy now, you’ll have to call back later. And hung up.

I get home that evening and my wife goes, um, did Dire Straits management call you? And I was like, oh no, are you kidding me? Fortunately they called back the next day and off I went to London. Mark had been in Nashville and made a record with Paul Franklin, who’s widely considered the best steel player ever.

He had said, well, if we’re going to put Dire Straits back together, I want Paul involved in this record. So he basically went to Paul and he said, you know, who’s great in Nashville? And Paul said, we should get Chuck. That’s why I always say the musicians are your best friends, so you have to be very kind to them when you’re making records.
For the Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling mix engineer Jeff Braun (Jason Aldean, Kane Brown, Jelly Roll), his role as a mixer is defined by simply ‘sweetening’ the intention and hard work of the artist and producer, rather than injecting his own sonic stamp onto the project.

In this episode of #TilYouMakeIt, Jeff Braun speaks on the various ways he approaches mixing and why adapting his creative process to suit each project is a crucial step in maximizing and doing justice to the sound and style of the song.

#TilYouMakeIt chronicles stand-out moments from the careers of the world’s most esteemed producers, mixers, and engineers.

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With LISTENTO from Audiomovers you can stream uncompressed multichannel audio to and from any DAW. Ready to go in five minutes. Just send a link.

Try it for free for a month now with code TILYOUMAKEIT at checkout.

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TRANSCRIPT

I don’t want to put my sonic stamp on everything because then everything sounds like me, not the artist. I want it to sound like what the producer and the artist worked so hard for. I just want to sweeten that.

I’d rather not have like a signature sound because my whole thing is I’m trying to improve upon what I was given. The production process and the producer should kind of have that on the tracks and then I want to come in and elevate that five percent, ten percent, just get it across the finish line.

If the session comes to me as stems, that’s kind of one process because then I can use everything how I want to use it. I can set the session up how I want to set it up. I can do the routing, I can do the subgroups, I can do anything kind of how I want it.

If it comes in as a session, I’m working out of the producer session and there are certain times where I can’t unbuild it and put it into something that I want to work in because it changes sonically too much, so I want to work where they left off and if that’s crazy routing, if that’s something that I don’t normally do, I just have to adapt and make that work.

I’ve got almost every plug-in there is and if it’s something that is new I’ll just get it, you kind of have to because you have to start where the producer left off.
Five-time Grammy Award-winning mixer, engineer and producer F. Reid Shippen (Kenny Chesney, Ingrid Michaelson, Gloria Gaynor) shares his take on the special bond between mixing and mastering engineers.

Watch as Shippen reflects on when he first discovered the work of Grammy-nominated mastering engineer, owner of @infrasonicsound, and now long-term collaborator Pete Lyman (Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile).

#TilYouMakeIt chronicles stand-out moments from the careers of the world’s most esteemed producers, mixers and engineers.

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TRANSCRIPT

Well, uh, we met on Tinder, and, uh, no, I’m totally kidding. Ha, ha, ha.

The first time I knew of Pete is I did a record, and they sent it out for mastering, and I didn’t know who was mastering it.

It came back and it sounded amazing. And it sounded like [FAMOUS MASTERING GUY] Right? Who is incredible. And I was like, Oh, I know who you guys sent this to, you sent it to …. I recognize this. It’s killer.

And they were like, No, this is Pete Lyman. I was like, Who’s Pete Lyman? That’s how we met. He ended up, um, moving to Nashville and we just ended up collaborating on a bunch of stuff because our styles are pretty compatible.

You start to curate the relationships that are simpatico, and Pete and I work really well together, so it just kind of became a natural fit.
Nashville-based producer, engineer, and music production advocate Jeff Balding (Eagles, Dan + Shay, Jelly Roll) reveals how it felt to work for one of the world’s biggest bands, with over 200 million records sold and countless awards under their belt. It is no surprise that working with a band of this calibre is a major #PinchYourself moment for Jeff.

Maybe it’s working or jamming with a childhood hero or hearing a vocal that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

This is #PinchYourself. Create your own once-in-a-lifetime moments with an extended one-month trial of LISTENTO, when you use the code PINCH at checkout.

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TRANSCRIPT

My experience working with the Eagles has been great. That’s a band that, gosh, who doesn’t love them?

I grew up loving them, so to get a chance to work with them was a great experience. I worked with Don on his solo record as well, and Stan Lynch, who co-produced it with Don.

It’s always interesting when you go into different camps, because they have their style of production, their style and technique of what gets their attention, especially in a mix. But even during tracking, same thing.

And the great thing about Don was he’s so vocal focused on the music. Something would happen or something in the mix if, if a move was a little abrupt while the vocal is playing or something.

It’d be like, “no, you know what, that’s distracting from the vocal. We need to make sure we stay centered here”. So he was very good about keeping a focus of where things were going.

I mean, you listen to Eagles records, all the classics, and you go, those parts are just, everything’s in the right place.

And by accident, it’s like, a lot of searching to find those things. I mean, they had their ducks in a row.
Today, we are back at Blackbird Studios to speak with the studios’ former operations manager and resident drum tech, Paul Simmons, as he reflects favorably on his experience touring with various heavy hitters in the American rock scene.

From landing his first gig at the age of twenty with American Southern rockers Black Oak Arkansas to traveling the world with Petra, and spending six years touring with Cinderella’s lead songwriter Thomas Keifer, Paul’s dedication and precision playing behind the kit would eventually lead him to accepting the role of Blackbird Studios’ operations manager, and of course presiding over its enviable Alladin’s Cave of drum kits.

#TilYouMakeIt is a collection of stories capturing wisdom from the game’s most esteemed producers, mixers and engineers.

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TRANSCRIPT

When I first got a gig, I was twenty, I went out with a band called Black Oak Arkansas, and they were really huge in the seventies.

And I get this call, “Hey, do you want to come on the road with us? The drummer’s got to leave” and I’m like, yes, let’s go.

So I’m out on the road. I’m twenty years old. I’m playing with Black Oak, Arkansas, and it was a blast, did that for a while. And then I got the bug. I ended up getting a gig with a band called the Reverend Horton Heat and also played with the band Petra.

Which was incredible. We went all over the world. Those guys are great musicians and they had just released a really heavy rock album. So I was gung ho. That was great.

Then I ended up doing some session stuff for a while. And I went out with Tom Keifer from Cinderella for a while, which was great. One year turned into six, cause it just kept going and it was cool.

When the opportunity came up to be the operations manager here at Blackbird Studios, I jumped at it. That’s a cool opportunity.
In this episode of #TilYouMakeIt, Grammy-nominated, multi-platinum-selling mixing engineer Jeff Braun (Jason Aldean, Elle King, Nelly) reflects on having to improvise a makeshift vocal booth to cut Kane Brown’s vocals in Nashville with one of the world’s most sought-after vocal producers, Kuk Harrell, running the session from Los Angeles.

Five-time Grammy Award winner and Golden Globe nominee Kuk Harrell is responsible for defining the role of the modern vocal producer and has worked with artists like Rihanna, Beyonce, Celine Dion, Mary J. Blige and Lorde.

#TilYouMakeIt is a collection of stories capturing wisdom from the game’s most esteemed producers, mixers and engineers.

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TRANSCRIPT

I cut a bunch of vocals on Kane Brown songs. I got to work with Kuk Harrell and he produced like all those Rihanna vocal stuff. So he was producing from LA and we were cutting it here in Nashville.

We did Kane Brown and H.E.R Blessed & Free. We did Kane Brown and Swae Lee and Khalid. Kuk was in LA and I was at Kane’s house, so I set up like a makeshift vocal booth with blankets in their living room and we Audiomovered back and forth so that he could hear the session and then he would remote desktop into the system that I had set up at Kane’s house.

And the process was like, it was pretty seamless. He was producing the vocal. And we were just capturing it in the room

LISTENTO, it’s crazy. The technology’s amazing.
In this episode of #TilYouMakeIt, seven-time Grammy Award-winning producer, engineer and mixer Vance Powell (Chris Stapleton, Buddy Guy, Jack White) speaks on the delicate relationship between artists and their collaborators.

#TilYouMakeIt is a collection of stories chronicling those moments and capturing wisdom from the game’s most esteemed producers, mixers and engineers.

LISTENTO is the industry standard for remote audio. Get an extended free trial when you use the code TILYOUMAKEIT at checkout.

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TRANSCRIPT

Nurturing relationships with the artist is a little bit like nurturing a relationship with your mother-in-law. You want to do it, but you don’t want to become too friendly.

I want to know them. I want to know about them. I’d love to hear about their children, but unless they reach out to me, then I’m cool if we work together. We know each other. I respect them. They respect me. But I’m not saying, Hey, why don’t we do this? Or wouldn’t it be cool if we all went to the movies or you know, because they got life and that life doesn’t have anything to do with me when it’s not here.

Every relationship you have with an artist has a expiration date and a lot of times that expiration date will come and go and people will try and hang on and hang on and hang on. And that’s sad, but it’s human nature.

You know? It’s happened to me. It happened to me a little bit with Jack White. I mean, I worked with him for eight years straight on every single thing, and then I wasn’t, and it was because I was busy and it’s totally good.

Like I’m totally, we’re totally good. We work together afterwards, we’re totally good,

But I’m not calling him up and asking anybody to go to movies with me or whatever. It’s just, just weird. Don’t do it.

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