‘I’ve been really blessed to work with a lot of great people, I wake up every morning and think about it’ – !LLMIND
#TilYouMakeIt is a collection of stories chronicling those moments and capturing wisdom from the game’s most esteemed producers, mixers and engineers.
A successful career in music doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, patience, and an unwavering sense of dedication to achieve your goals and reach the dizzying heights of your dreams.
In this episode of #TilYouMakeIt, the renowned producer, songwriter and educator !LLMIND shares how he has gotten to where he is.
With almost twenty years of constant grind under his belt, he has gone from working with underground artists in the early 2000s to some of the biggest names in the business, putting his stamp on iconic tracks and achieving Grammy recognition.
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TRANSCRIPT
I’ve been really blessed to work with a lot of great people. I, I wake up every morning and I think about it like, wow, like, is this real?
It was a long grind for me. You know, I’ve been doing this full-time for almost twenty years from this super underground.
From the super underground artists from like the 2000s, you know, your Little Brother and Boot Camp Clik and, and then eventually working with, you know, 50 Cent and G-Unit.
And then from there it just snowballed. At this point, I’ve been, you know, really blessed enough to work with a lot of people.
Two Grammys, ten Grammy nominations, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Drake, Travis Scott, J Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Khalid, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Moana.
It’s been pretty crazy so it doesn’t feel real a lot of the time.
#NerdingOut is where we uncover the “tools of the pros” — the sacred plugins, gear and instruments that are essential to the process of award-winning producers, mixers and engineers.
Learn how acclaimed Producer and Recording Engineer Matt Genovese found and recapped an original 1960s Scully 280 tape machine.
This famously versatile piece of hardware has been used on records like ‘Led Zeppelin II’ and ‘III’ and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing’.
Matt utilizes it in various ways, including printing on individual tracks to mixing with it.
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TRANSCRIPT
Clients are always impressed about, you know, just seeing a tape machine in the room is cool, but when you record a song onto it, it’s a pretty big difference.
Most of the records that I love were all done on tape machines. A few months ago, I found a Scully 280 machine, which is from the sixties.
It was the same machine that they had in, uh, Stax Records and Motown. Records like Led Zeppelin two and three were done on it, Jimmy Hendrix’s Little Wing was done on it.
So it’s a very famous machine. I found it. I recapped it and got it working a hundred percent.
Again, I print individual tracks to it. Sometimes if I want that sound on a whole recording.
I’ll just send something to a compressor, I can insert the tape machine as a hardware insert, and then I also mix to it. So I mix with it in input record.
So I’m monitoring it through the electronics as I mix, and then when I’m done, I flip it to playback and I record it to tape, and so it runs straight outta my console, straight into the tape machine and outta the tape machine back into my computer where I print the final mix.
When you ab it with and without the tape, specifically with the Scully 280, it’s a big difference.
We’re diving into some of the hard won techniques and wisdom gained from working in the industry in our series #101.
For this instalment, we uncover the “co-mix” with multi-platinum recording and mix engineer Bainz.
He shares that there are multiple ways you can get a co-mix, but what’s essential is that everyone is acknowledged when they have significant involvement in making a record. #Bainz #Mixing #CoMix #MixingEngineer
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TRANSCRIPT
The co-mix is when any, they could be a bunch of different things.
You could be someone who has a studio who’s organizing the session and delivered with the artist, engineer is also a part of it.
A lot of times the recording engineer gets Co-Mix.
Really? That’s how I, that’s how I started when I, when I first, uh, was working on ‘So Much Fun’, Alex gave me Co-Mix on a lot of them, cuz it was a lot of the stuff that I did in the recording sessions that’s stuck on.
It could just be you’re getting an acapella for someone else. It could be actually sitting in the room like me and my assistant do together a lot. Like, you know, give him Co-Mix, cause we work on the records together.
I’ll do some stuff, he’ll do some stuff. We’ll give each other ideas or here, whatever.
I might leave my finished a record. Vice versa.
When he’s prepping, he might get started or working on it.
Everything is collaborative these days and I feel like everyone should kind of get credit for it cuz that’s really what we hold proud.
‘If we’re not enjoying making it, you’re not going to enjoy listening to it’ – Jack Leonard
We join songwriter, and producer Jack Leonard in his London studio as he talks us through his process when listening to mixes remotely.
Watch to discover how he uses LISTENTO to give real-time feedback to his LA-based collaborator Matthew Genovese.
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TRANSCRIPT
If we’re not enjoying making it, you’re not going to enjoy it listening to it.
My name is Jack Leonard, and we are in my studio in London.
So I’ll be working with Matt, he’s producer based out in LA.
We’re at the next stage now he’s going to be sending me the LISTENTO link and so it’s like I’m in the room with him.
We’re going to be going in and making some tweaks together to finish off the track.
If you really feel like that guitar needs to come up. You really feel it in the moment and it’s like it has to come up if you have to send a load of emails to describe that it’s sort of just was it down?
Makes the project just like quick and easy.
#DreamCollabs uncovers the reasons behind these collaborations and why it’s essential to dream big, whether meeting their childhood music heroes, working with an emerging artist that excites them or collaborating with an artist whose sound has influenced the creative choices these industry powerhouses make.
In the latest episode, we speak to legendary mixing engineer Teezio about his dream collaborations, from sharing career-changing opportunities with the acclaimed production duo Daytrip to collaborating on the art that surprises him.
Watch to discover who these #DreamCollabs are. Trust us, we can already tell these collaborations would be out of this world.
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TRANSCRIPT
“My dreams of my ideal session would be to work with –
I’d want to work with the producers Daytrip who are very close friends of mine. They’re like the nicest guys ever.
And I’d want them to do a record with Adele. And I’d want to be there and I’d want to cut Adele’s vocals and then I want to mix the record. That would be like n right?
Now if you ask me what I want to do, because I really fuck with it. Do you guys know who Central Cee is? ‘How could I be homophobic? My bitch is gay.’
Shit liked that. I was like, fuck who says shit like that?
That’s the type of shit that I like stuff that catches me by surprise. I need to work with him. I want to come to my house and smoke weed with me. And I want to make a record for him.
Just give me the song and let me do it. Like I want to be a part of it.“
Audiomovers are uncovering the biggest pinch-me-moments that the world’s most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers have experienced, from working with childhood heroes to winning Grammy Awards and No.1 Records, discover it all with #PinchYourself.
In the latest episode, we are joined by the multi-platinum Grammy nominated mixing and recording engineer Bainz, as he recounts his trip to Jamaica to record Gunna’s album ‘Slime Language 2’.
Slime Language is the debut collaborative compilation album by American record label YSL Records and American rapper Young Thug, who is the leader of the label.
Watch the full video to discover why these sessions and the collaborators involved made Bainz pinch himself.
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TRANSCRIPT
“There are so many of them man. There’s so many of them.
Working on ‘Slime Language’, working on Gunna’s album in Jamaica.
Sitting in between, we were recording a verse with Thug, Gunna, Future, Travis Scott, Offset – they’re all jumping on the same song and I’m the one person sitting in the middle of the room recording everyone.
All these huge personalities around and everyone’s on a first name basis with me, really cool with me, it’s just I don’t know man it does get surreal and I know a lot of people look at it like wow, that’s that’s cool.
There’s a lot of those and I hope that there will be a lot more.”
We visited number-one-selling songwriter and record producer Alina Smith (ITZY, Red Velvet, Fall Out Boy) in her home studio, to delve deeper into the process behind the production and mix of Bathing Suit, by her LYRE MUSIC GROUP counterpart, Elli Moore.
Taking us into the original Ableton session, Alina demonstrates the magnitude of creative possibilities that come from using your voice to create synth and pad sounds, unveiling the plugins she uses to bring these elements to life.
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TRANSCRIPT
Hi, I’m Alina Smith, a writer and producer in LYRE Music Group and today I’m going to be showing you the production on Bathing Suit by Elli Moore.
Okay, the first thing I want to point out here – this is a technique I use on every single song I produce. I have a pretty airy voice, and I use it as a pad quite a bit, so you can hear this here.
I really advocate for people using their voices and their natural qualities to enhance their productions and h ere I basically stack several parts, to add a little bit of ‘oomph’ to this post-chorus.
So I accomplish this very simply. Obviously starts with the voice. You have to sing, you know in a soft, airy way. I also use Valhalla Shimmer plugin by Valhalla DSP. It’s one of my favourites, it really does add a shimmer on top of the track. It’s very oddly named.
And I use Center by Waves, which is one of my favourite plugins for vocals. It helps me get background vocals out of the way of the leads by spreading them to the side. This is what it sounds like without processing. As you can tell, quite dull, and this is it with it on. Big difference.
Okay, another technique that I use, pretty much in every song, some people call this chants, I call this gangs. It can be like a ‘yeah’ ‘uh’ like a kind of a yell thing. Or it’s like chanty type of singing, like we have this hook here.
So obviously, we’re trying to emphasise that ‘la la la’ hook and this is a really good way to do it. So the way I’ve accomplished this is the two of us are basically singing these gangs together in the room.
There’s no auto-tune, the mic is pretty far away, like about this distance from us. And we’re just singing very kind of loosely, wildly, it doesn’t have to be too on pitch and too perfect because it’s tucked in under the lead vocal in the mix. This is what it sounds like without any processing.
One of the things though, that makes these gangs for me is the processing. So I have this chain here that I just called ‘Dirty Gang’.
It starts with Decapitator which is a saturation plugin, and then I will take away the lowest part of the frequency range and the highest part of the frequency range.
Then I use my favourite plugin ever, which is Valhalla vintage verb I am known as the ‘Valhalla back girl’. And here I’m just adding a bit of this reverb, you know, a pretty high decay three seconds is pretty significant.
And then we have Center which again spreads it a bit more to the sides . This is what it sounds like with all the processing on.
To create the sound of multiple singers when you’re alone, you have to change the way you sing. You basically need to sing a melody and try to pretend you’re different people you can sing it in like a hooty kind of voice, you can sing very nasally, you can sing it in your normal type of range, type of voice and combining all of these different techniques will make it sound like a group.
There is another technique I want to show you guys that also has to do with using your voice as an instrument. It’s basically singing and re-pitching to make almost like a synth part out of a voice. So I’ll play you guys this pre-chorus part of the song.
So if you listen close, there is a part underneath here that is sort of this very high pitched, floating kind of vocal. This could have been accomplished with the synth, but I chose to just sing this in and process it in a way that makes it sound like this weird like processed synthy high thing.
So I’ll play it solo’d. So obviously if you are an amazing singer and can sing this in whistle tone, you can do that. Most of us are not, so I sing this, I’m pretty sure an octave lower than this. And then what I did is just add reverb on top of it. So it’s very easy to do and quite fun the melodies you can get this way.
We have really great mix and mastering engineers we work with. A lot of the time, the engineers will do the bulk of the work on their own. But we will get together with them on Zoom using LISTENTO and we will give notes and they can just in real time, fix those final tweaks for us.
Introducing: #DreamCollabs – a series where we chat with the world’s most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers about their dream musical collaborations.
#DreamCollabs uncovers the reasons behind these collaborations and why it’s essential to dream big, whether it be meeting their childhood music heroes, working with an emerging artist that excites them or collaborating with an artist whose sound has influenced the creative choices these industry powerhouses make.
In this first episode, we are joined by writer, producer, mixer and collaborator extraordinaire Matthew Genovese.
Matthew Genovese’s dream collaborator is The 1975 and how similar musical influences, and a passion for balancing the qualities of both analog and digital music production has informed his pick.
Trust us we can already tell that this collaboration would be extraordinary.
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TRANSCRIPT
A dream collaboration – I would love to work with the 1975.
I feel like we have a lot of similar influences. They even have the same console that I have, which is kind of rare. It’s one of the actually the big reasons I can’t send sessions back and forth to people is because they don’t have that and so that would work out.
And I just feel like they would have a lot of fun in my studio with synths and instruments.
Everybody has to be here because I have all the gear that I want here and I know how my room sounds and everything set up exactly how I want to work.
As the 2023 Grammy season winds to a close we would like to congratulate all of the nominees and winners from this year’s 65th annual awards show. Let’s dive into some of this year’s biggest releases & Grammy nominations.
First up is the 2023 Grammy nominee, mixer/engineer & LISTENTO maverick Teezio. Nominated for his work on Chris Brown’s tenth studio album ‘Breezy’, which was up for Best R&B Album at this year’s awards.
As part of our #TheMakingOf series, Teezio gave us an access-all-areas look into the process for mixing the opening track to the album’ ’Till The Wheels Fall Off’, featuring Lil Durk and Capella Grey.
Teezio takes us through his vocal chain for Chris, the importance of reductive EQing, as well as how he co-mixed the track with his collaborator Bainz by using Audiomovers.
Next we have multi-time Grammy Award winning mixing engineer Jesse Ray Ernster, who was nominated for five Grammy Awards at this year’s 65th Annual Awards Show.
Jesse was in contention for ‘Record of The Year’ for his work on Doja Cat’s ‘Woman’, ‘Best Global Music Album’ for ‘Love, Damini’ by Burna Boy, alongside three participation nominations for his work with both Doja Cat & Burna Boy.
As part of our #TheMakingOf series, Jesse gave us an access-all-areas look at the mixing process for Doja’s chart-topping album ‘Planet Her’, describing it as “a game of small subtle tweaks”, embellishing and lifting the impact of the record with small, precise decisions.
The final #TheMakingOf video in our Grammy series features acclaimed mixer/engineer Bainz, who was nominated for two Grammy Awards this year.
Bainz was in contention for ‘Best Rap Performance’ for Gunna & Future ft. Young Thug’s ‘Pushin P’ and ‘Best Rock Album’ for his work on Machine Gun Kelly’s ‘Mainstream Sellout’.
Bainz sat down to chat with us about his creative process by breaking down the mix of T-Shyne – ‘Fighting Demons’ (feat. Young Thug).
Bainz broke down some of the workflows and techniques he brings to most of his sessions, as well as what’s unique to this track and how he approaches maximizing what is already great about the track, and how he incorporates so much analog gear into his mixes.
Audiomovers are uncovering the biggest pinch-me-moments that the world’s most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers have experienced, from working with childhood heroes to winning Grammy Awards and No.1 Records, discover it all with #PinchYourself.
As part of our #GrammyAwards celebrations, it felt fitting to launch the series with !llmind, who describes that goosebumps moment when he won his first Grammy at the 61st Awards for his work on Jay Z and Beyonce’s The Carters album ‘EVERYTHING IS LOVE’ and everything changed.
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Audiomovers’ presence was felt in an enormous way at this year’s Grammy Awards. Over two-dozen artists and their respective teams using LISTENTO to remotely collaborate with HQ lossless audio.
To celebrate we have made the perfect Grammy party playlist for you to enjoy, stocked full of the biggest and brightest hits from 2022.
Audiomovers are uncovering the biggest pinch-me-moments that the world’s most esteemed producers, engineers and mixers have experienced, from working with childhood heroes to winning Grammy Awards and No.1 Records, discover it all with #PinchYourself.
As part of our #GrammyAwards celebrations, it felt fitting to launch the series with !llmind, who describes that goosebumps moment when he won his first Grammy at the 61st Awards for his work on Jay Z and Beyonce’s The Carters album ‘EVERYTHING IS LOVE’ and everything changed.
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TRANSCRIPT
I was at the Grammys, I think it was 2019. The nomination was for Jay-Z & Beyonce, the Carters album, the first song I did on there.
And the moment that they opened the envelope and said Jay-Z, Beyonce, Carter’s, I just like I flipped, like my heart just like flipped upside down. And I was like, Holy shit, like, after all these years, and after all these moments, you finally are a Grammy winner.
You know, it’s like one thing to like, be nominated, but like to actually have a winning Grammy. It’s a whole other category of where that puts you.
And so yeah, that was just a huge like, pinch me moment because I remember all the years of grinding and people telling me you’ll never make it and like you’re just an Asian kid from Jersey. You can’t do hip-hop beats. You can’t do house beats you can’t do this. And it was just another like feather in the cap.
Just keep focusing and doing what you’re doing because whatever you’re doing is like working and you won to Grammy so like just keep going.
