The Keys To A Six Figure Mastering Studio | With Chris Graham And Mike Indovina

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one 33 woo.

[00:00:07] You're listening to the six bigger studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian and Chris. Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm coming here with my. Deepen central voice recording in the early morning hours.

[00:00:29] And so this is what I sound like in the morning. I am not here with my bald, beautiful purple shorted cohost today, Chris Graham, and he hasn't been here lately. And so if you are new to this podcast, and you've only listened to like the last handful of episodes. You may not even realize that we have a cohost, a cohost who is awesome at what he does and very smart and sometimes has a lot better insight than I can give you.

[00:00:51] So today I wanted to change things up a little bit or a lot a bit. Actually, this is the first time I've ever done this and give you a little, a little taste of Chris Graham, even though he's taken a little time off the podcast. And how am I doing this? Well, friend of ours, Mike Indiana runs a website and a podcast called master your mics.

[00:01:07] And he actually had Chris on his podcast months and months ago. And I listened to episode recently and I was like, this is something we need to actually have on our podcast because it's, it's basically a Chris Graham story in a nutshell, except it's a little bit more updated since the last time that we interviewed Chris on this podcast, which was literally episode two.

[00:01:24] We're on episode 133 now, so I figured why not have Chris back on the podcast again to tell his story. And, uh, the best way to do that is to just take an episode he did with our friend Mike and Davina and publish it here again. So this is a replay episode from the master your mix podcast. And again, thank you so much, Mike, for allowing us to take this episode and republish it on our podcast.

[00:01:46] But this is a lengthy one. And if you're missing Chris right now, this is a great episode for you. If you've never heard Chris talk before or really don't know Chris's story as a mastering engineer, this episode is for you. And the reason is he has a completely different business model than what I practice.

[00:02:00] He is high volume, low margin mastering business where he's having to master a hundred plus songs a month. Where in my business, a 20 song month is a huge month. So in this episode, Chris talks about how he got his start. He talks about how he's differentiated himself. He even gets a little bit into gear talk because it's not Chris Graham.

[00:02:17] If he doesn't get the gears, let alert. Although we withhold the gear slot alert on this episode just to respect Mike's podcast. And I think one of the most beneficial parts of this episode is when they get into how to set yourself apart from everyone else. And there's a, there's a part in there, and I want you to listen to it and really think about it is sometimes different is better than good.

[00:02:36] And that sounds a little weird. But you'll understand what I'm saying here once they get to that section. So without further ado, deep in central morning voice here is Mike's interview with Chris crane.

[00:02:51] Chris Graham, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Oh, it's my pleasure to be here, man. I'm excited to hang out with you. Dead awesome man. Not know your story and how you got into mastery. And can you give us a little bit of that background? Yeah. So my story, um, when I was in college, I. Found out that you could major in audio production, which meant that you could record yourself for free.

[00:03:13] And I was like, wait, I'm a musician. If I major in this, I won't have to pay anyone to record my music anymore. And that was, that was really, yet, that was the entire reason. Like I got into audio. I've always loved audio. I've always been fascinated by speakers and EKU and recording and the whole nine yards.

[00:03:31] Anything that made noise as a kid, I was just like. Fascinated by, and so a big part of that was my uncle was a musician. And when I turned like 13 or 14 he showed up on my birthday, he loaned me something for my birthday and he loaned me a giant PV console. Slash. Amplifier. It was like this ridiculous 1980s.

[00:03:55] It's seriously weighed like maybe 300 pounds and he put it, brought a speaker, brought the amp slash mixing board and just let me play with it in the basement for like two years. That changed my life. So I like figured out how to like use a and like signal flow and all this stuff. So when I got to college.

[00:04:13] Decided to major in audio. Uh, I was like a singer, song writer. Um, so I would go to coffee shops or play shows and play songs. I made up for people and eventually started using a lot of audio gear as well. So looping pedals and different effects. And I was really lucky in that this is like 2001, 2002, so at the very end of people still being willing to buy an entire CD if they liked one song that you did.

[00:04:37] So it was a really, really lucrative time to be like this independent. Self, you know, DIY ish type musician. So I hired like a friend of mine to do a record, made a CD. It was really cheap. It's like 800 bucks. So like really stripped down, print it out. I got a credit card, my first credit card and use the credit card too.

[00:04:58] Get the CD manufactured and my grandpa, this was like a really big moment for me. My, my grandpa was like, don't do a Chris and my grandpa like really successful. He's like, millionaire, built a business from scratch, knows his stuff. It was, don't do it, Chris, don't take, don't take that risk. Don't put it on a credit card.

[00:05:14] And it was like a really big moment for me like becoming a man. Cause I stood up to him and I was like, grandpa, you just need to accept that I know my market better than you do. And he was like. Oh, okay. Whoa. Yeah. Boy. And uh, so it was like, I didn't know any better, but that was the right thing to say. Got a bunch of CDs printed up, started selling them and broke even on their day.

[00:05:36] I released it. That's amazing. It was awesome. So like infected me. I was like, Oh, right. Music the way you make money. And uh, I didn't realize that that wasn't maybe totally true, but I was like, really lucky. And so anyways, I took, I paid off the CD, um, and then I started selling a bunch of them. I, you know, tour mostly like East coast and play, like, like young life camps.

[00:06:02] I don't know if anyone knows about young life, but it was like, it's like a Christian, like kid that camp, but not for Christian kids. And so I would like go and play these shows. I'd like, you know, go out for a weekend as a college kid. I'd sell like. You know, 180 CDs. I drive home and like it was just me.

[00:06:21] So it was all pure profit. So I took all that money, bought recording gear, started producing other singer songwriters. So basically I'd record a song on my own and say, Hey, look what I made. And they'd say, Hey, can you make something for me? And I would say, Oh, absolutely. And I would basically, I would do these, like my first record was like the first record that was ever a full record.

[00:06:43] That was like full band that I did. I didn't even have the gear yet. I like made the sale. Somebody hired me, I convinced them to hire me and then I took their money, their down payment and went out and bought like more preempts and stuff. I did the exact same thing when I first started. It's awesome. It was great cause it was like, all right Chris, you took the money, you made some purchases.

[00:07:02] Now you better figure this out. And obviously, you know, nobody does a great job in their first record, but it was a heck of a learning experience. And, uh, it really motivated me to like learn, this is such a bad choice, but I, I chose digital performer as my dog and it's like the least popular dog you can get that's older than like five years old.

[00:07:23] I used cool edit pro. Oh man. Taking me back. That was actually my, my first like. Let's be honest, nobody paid for cool edit pro. Back in the day. It was all pirated. So like my first software was cool at pro, and then I pirated dish. And then as soon as I, uh, my second project I paid, I paid for digital performer.

[00:07:43] So I like used it for a little while, uh, and then paid it off. Definitely am not pro pirating at all now. I don't pirate anything, haven't for. 15 or 20 years. So I think the statute of limitations has expired on that government. And, uh, so anyways, uh, so yeah. So, uh, let me kind of get myself back to my point here.

[00:08:07] So yeah, started making records for people, mostly singer song writers, and like I would basically, they create a band for them. So I would like figure out who their favorite artists were, figure out who played on their favorite artists records and. Contact these musicians, drummers, bass players, guitar players, et cetera.

[00:08:24] And then I'd make like a dream package for my clients and say, Hey, I know you're a fan of XYZ musician. I know his drummer and his bass player cause I just reached out to them on Facebook and got them to give me a quote. And, uh, I can put this all together. We'll go a little record scratch tracks here at your house, probably like all set up at your house, or you'll come to like my house and then we'll go down to Nashville or wherever.

[00:08:48] Um, we'll record tracks with them. We'll come back, we'll finish the record. And. I didn't know it, but I was like the worst producer ever because I was my, like, production history was mostly related to me. Like my philosophy as a producer was related to my, to my philosophy as an athlete, which was, I was like a pole vaulter and across country in a 800 meter race.

[00:09:10] Uh. Track guy was like my favorite thing in high school and so my thought was if you want people to do a better job, just be really mean to them and just be like, you could do better than that. Get back in there and do another vocal take and just, that's not the, that's not a good production style in the singer songwriters genre.

[00:09:28] It might be in like heavy metal or something. And, uh, you can definitely shoot down somebody's ego and make them like absolutely low the you by the end of the session. And I was so good at that, and so I didn't know it, but I was like not a good producer. Um, because I had a lot of social skill issues, um, in that, like, I just approached motivating.

[00:09:51] I approached like getting the best out of an artist and just a really terrible way, but. I was really good at the tech side of things. So like I could sit down and figure out anything I wanted to pretty quickly from a tech side. So, um, some of my clients, uh, would. Eventually run out of money and then we would have to like finish the record and there was no rec, there was no budget for a mix engineer, there was no budget for a mastering engineer.

[00:10:19] So I would have to do everything so that there were like a record would get released so that my future clients would hear it so that I would get more projects and like, this was like the silliest thing in the world because when you're like, Oh, I'm going to fake the mastering and it's not going to be as good as it could, but whatever like that affects.

[00:10:37] You don't get more projects by releasing subpar projects. You get more clients by releasing awesome projects that people are like, wow, how do you do that? That sounds amazing. I want my record to sound like that. Air quotes. Yep. And that's like the way that you grow a production company. And I didn't do that.

[00:10:55] Right. And I ended up mastering a lot of my, my clients projects. And it turned out I was good at it. And so I started reaching out to other producers and saying, Hey, you know, can I remaster a record you've already released? That was awesome cause I would have like the master that that had been released.

[00:11:13] And then I would try to do a better job. And it was great because I would, you know, do these masters for my friends that were producers and they all came back and were like, Holy crap, you're so much better than our current mastering engineer. We're going to use you from now on. And I basically just did that a lot.

[00:11:28] And then eventually, um. I noticed. I really feel like as you're, you're building a business and audio. That ultimately, or in music or whatever, you have to listen to what people are telling you, and if everyone's like, Oh dude, that slow song that you did was amazing. Then do more slow songs, or Oh my gosh, when you mix, it's so great, but you're producing and you're tracking and you're the drummer and all that thing.

[00:11:51] You have to listen to what people are like freaking out about, and that's your niche. That's where you should go. And that's what happened with me and mastering is that I would. The feedback I would get when I mastered other people's records was just like five X the positivity of anything else I did.

[00:12:07] And so it just was natural to sort of lean into that. And you know, for me, I, uh, my wife had a teaching job so I could afford to take risks. She was making a great living. This is like, boy, 12 years ago or 11 years ago or something. And, uh, so I like decided I'm just going to stop taking any projects that aren't mastering, which was crazy.

[00:12:29] Um, I definitely should have like slowly leaned into it more, but as, as it worked out, um, there was this, uh. This friend of mine that was a local producer that invited me over to the studio and they were tracking the record for this guy, John Rubin. John Rubin at the time was like historically one of the number one Christian rappers in the world.

[00:12:49] And uh, which is weird. Like, I'm like, I have a weird background and I was like born and raised Catholic, and then I became an atheist and then I became a Christian again, much later in life. So like Christian music is. I hated it as an atheist, and I'm still like navigating that as a Christian. Yeah.

[00:13:08] Anyways, so, uh, it was this amazing opportunity and I'm like sitting in the studio, hanging out with them, and they had just gotten masters back. Like, gosh, we hate these masters. They sound so bad. And I was like, I'm a mastering engineer. Can I try it? And they're like, yeah, sure. And so I mastered forum and, uh, had like the references of like masters that they didn't like.

[00:13:30] And I made something they did like it was that, that was, that was that simple. And they're like, Oh my gosh, this is great. So that was like my first big portfolio piece, and I've just booked tons and tons of projects off of that. Oh, I skipped a big part of my story when I decided to go full time as a mastering engineer.

[00:13:47] My mentor had always told me, you know you, you could do this for a living. You're really good at this. He was a producer. He's one of the first guys. I did samples for our first guys. I like mastered one of those records that he had already released four and I was always like, yeah, right. No way. That's impossible.

[00:14:00] How would I get enough clients to do this full time? And one night I was talking to my wife and we were. I don't know. I don't remember how it came up, but the thought was, well, I could never be a full time Astron engineer, cause people don't even really know what mastering is. It's so mysterious. It's so weird.

[00:14:17] And I had this idea of like, well what if I had a website and there was like a player and you would select the genre of music you wanted to hear a sample of, and then you could hit before and after, back and forth in real time. And it would basically just switch back and forth between a mastered and unmastered version.

[00:14:33] This, this doesn't sound that exciting now because everyone does that. But at the time. At the time, nobody had done this yet. It was definitely the first guy to do this. So when I put that player on the website, people would go to the website and be like, Oh, I see what he does. Yeah, that sounds way better.

[00:14:50] Cool, awesome. I'll hire him. And I started running all kinds of Google ads, so I started doing a ton of paid advertising, and. The idea was just like, show them what I do. Give them a free sample and just promote the heck out of, let me do one song as a sample for you and I'll show you that I'm decent at this because of the before and after player, and it just exploded.

[00:15:13] It was just this like massive, ridiculous, like, Holy crap. Uh, 20 people want me to do a sample today. And I like really quickly have like a miniature breakdown and was like, um, I'm not, I'm still really poor and I'm like, good at this. But at the same time, like I can't keep up with the demand here. And I was booking projects.

[00:15:36] It was awesome. Like strangers are hiring me. Um, but I'll remember it really clearly. I was sitting right where I'm standing right now and. My wife had picked up the book for me at the library called the four hour workweek that a friend had recommended, and it had sat behind me for three months collecting late fees, and I was like, you know what, F this dude, like, I can't, this isn't working.

[00:16:00] I can't take it. I need something. I'm going to turn to the, like, this is my last resort. I'm going to read a book. And so I grabbed the book, went to a coffee shop down the road and was like, I don't have time to read this whole book. I'll just skip to. Chapter five that looks interesting. And like the book, the four hour work week sounds like a book for like scam artists.

[00:16:20] It's not, it's this amazing like reorientate how you think about work reorientate about how you think about your own efficiency and shed all the ego issues that are holding you back. And so I read chapter five not to get like way too into it, but. Talked about something called the 80 20 principle, which is this idea that 80% of your problems come from 20% of the stuff that you do, and 80% of your income comes from 20% of the things that you do.

[00:16:48] And the logical conclusion there is like, well, you need to stop doing some things and try to do, once you've stopped doing some things that are, you know, that 20% that creates 80% of your misery. Like that 20% of type of project or a certain client or tool that you use, like fire that move on from that, and then you'll have more free time.

[00:17:09] Spend that time trying to duplicate the 20% of the things that you do that are creating 80% of your results. And like, I read that and it was just like getting hit by lightning. It was. Magical, and so I went home and re tackled my business. Long story short, built a real business with real systems and customer satisfaction went through the roof.

[00:17:32] I had way more free time. My work improved dramatically because it wasn't like I showed up and was like, I'm miserable. I don't want to work 12 hours for the 10th day in a row. Like I would work reasonable hours, which means I would make better decisions, which means the masters were way better. And then when I would have a conversation with the client on the phone, which is like my favorite thing to do, I like talking to people.

[00:17:55] So this is a terrible, terrible, terrible business to be in if you like talking to people because that's not what you do as a mastery. You listen. Not like talk and anyways, so it's not a very relational business, at least traditionally. So all of a sudden, like once my business started to run, well, once I started to figure out what the heck I was doing, there was all this opportunity to have conversations with clients and get a better idea of what they were going for.

[00:18:21] Get a better idea of like their dreams and their hopes and stuff. And it just, all of a sudden like the business is fun. Like when I'm working for my mastering business, it's not work. It's a blast. It's like. I like to liken it to, you know, some people like to do crossword puzzles or Sudoku. Matt, that's what mastering is for me.

[00:18:38] It's just fun. I enjoy it. I like get giggly and excited when I, you know, when I show up for work each day and it's a blast. But it's only because I decided to like get my butt in gear and learn what, what a business, what business is. And mostly that's about like creating systems so that you can provide consistent.

[00:18:58] Awesome results and consistent, awesome customer service day in and day out no matter what. That's amazing. I love that you told the story about reading the four hour work week cause I had a similar experience to it and I for years I was like, I hate reading like readings for success. And the first time I read a book, like I think it might've been the four hour work week.

[00:19:18] Actually there was another book before that, which I'm almost ashamed to admit that was like a life changing book for me. But it was this book called the game. Okay. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I haven't. It's a book about this guy who have, this is the pickup art pickup artist. Honestly, man, that book changed my life.

[00:19:36] That book introduced me to the four hour work week because like it was so much about like work on yourself and like, yeah. Except that you're going to get rejected and like put yourself out there and get into all these uncomfortable situations. And for me, that's what I needed at the time. And it wasn't even just to like meet women at that time.

[00:19:52] Like it was like for me, it was like I just needed that. I had this like kind of like self-conscious issue. And then that. Once I read that book and kind of like started to implement some of the stuff I like realized, you know what more I put myself out there, the more I see these results and then the better, better my love life was going, the better my business was going.

[00:20:13] Well, there's no stronger incentive than to, uh, meet a significant other. So yeah, that'll. Definitely light a fire under your butt. Yeah. But so anyway, yeah, once I read the four hour work week after that, and that just kind of like spiraled me into this book world where like I realized the value in books now.

[00:20:28] And I think that that's so important that we don't talk about that very much in audio. You know, we talk about like deer and whatever, and we're going to talk a lot about your on this episode today, but like, like, yeah, it's amazing how sometimes just shifting your mindset of how to approach things in life.

[00:20:44] Just alters your future. Yeah. Well, and it's a funny thing, like the. You know, I'm, I'm the same as you. I didn't really like reading and like my wife wanted me to read and it wasn't until I like read, started reading these self help business books where I was like, wait, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. So you're telling me books are actually educational in a practical sense of like, this could immediately help me with something.

[00:21:10] And it was just, Oh my gosh. Like. Last place I would have thought I would have ever had any impact on my own life. So I just like form this addiction. I don't even, five, six, seven, eight dozen business books I've read at this point. And like, it's just amazing to like pick up a book like that. And. I use the term business books kind of loosely.

[00:21:33] The, basically there's self-improvement books and you pick up a book like that, and even if there's one sentence that just like rocks your face off, it was totally worth 15 freaking dollars to buy that on Amazon. And like, I'm just obsessed with this concept because historically, like our country America, are you in the U S Canada?

[00:21:55] I'm in Toronto. Okay. Okay. Let's say thanks. Same thing. When we got our independence from great Britain, like back in the day, there was this push to, it was called, it was a period of quote unquote enlightenment, and it was a totally normal thing to read for self improvement, and it was the absolute bedrock of the United States being founded.

[00:22:16] And. Freaking freaking amazing. But then we go through phases in our society and in each country, I guess, where, where we're more focused on romanticism and less focused on enlightenment. And right now we're sort of swinging out of a romantic period and into an enlightenment period. And like YouTube is one of the Harbinger's of this.

[00:22:36] Of like you can get on YouTube and whatever you need to know. You know, like here's your drain plug. Go on YouTube. Do you need to replace the water pump? And your 1999 Jeep Wrangler. True story. Go on YouTube. And like, so that's this amazing time of empowerment. But at the same time, YouTube is great, but there is nothing.

[00:22:57] That's more chocked full of amazing information than the right self help book. Because the right self help book was written by one of like top dozen people in any given field because they can make a lot of money doing that. So to sit down with like 180 page book from a world expert, I just read this book called the one thing, and I forget the guy's name, Gary, uh, what's his name?

[00:23:25] Anyways, he's like, I don't know, a hundred millionaire, billionaire or something like that. This dude like took everything he learned. I'm building one of the largest real estate, I think the largest real estate companies in the world and wrote a book about it, and so you pay 12 or 13 or 14 bucks for this book, and it's like this incredible mentor.

[00:23:45] Yeah. It just walks you through, Hey, this is what works and this is what doesn't about getting work done. And it's just this like, Oh, unbelievable. So yeah, I'm just, this is like part of my obsession with art, with doing podcasting and with our podcast, the six figure home studio is just trying to light a fire under people's butts to experiment with enlightenment, you know, to experiment with trying to self to better yourself and read books because it's just this, like, the coolest thing in the world is generating freedom.

[00:24:14] Is for you to be able to do what you want, when you want, how you want, and the only way to do that is to get smarter. And the best, fastest, easiest way to do that is probably books, but also listening to podcasts. So, yeah. Yeah. The podcasts are the new YouTube in a way. Yeah. Oh, dude. Copyright, right? Yeah.

[00:24:34] You need to, you need to trademark that. They are the new YouTube. I've been preaching that. I really think the next decade is the decade of podcasting. It's a lot of the audio book, like we're, we're going to go back to like more people being deep into books, but the podcast is like the, the audio book Gish kind of transition into that.

[00:24:55] Yeah. It's like a combination of YouTube and books basically. Yeah. And yeah, I really firmly believe that we're coming into this next decade. It's going to be podcast, like we're going to look back and say, that's when the podcast really started to grow because. I dunno how many of you guys that are listening are listening on the Apple podcast app.

[00:25:13] It's like the most popular app there is. It's the worst app ever. It's so bad you can't see download numbers to see, which is the most popular episode. You can't write a review on an episode. You can't comment if you want to share. It's like three clicks buried deep into like how to even get it. There's just no way to create a community easily.

[00:25:38] And the way that the rest of like YouTube or Twitter or Instagram. Or any other social app out there. So podcasting really isn't social media yet. It's just new media. But once social media and podcasting collide, Ooh, boy, podcasts are going to grow so fast. Awesome. So let's take it back a little bit. You were talking about, um.

[00:25:59] So you kind of just were working on projects and kind of got thrown to the wolves when it came to having to learn how to master. How did you learn to master? Cause for so many people mastering is this like dark art that people don't know, like what it is. It's this mystery, right? And there's a lot of people who think that if you know how to use an EKU, a limiter, a compressor, then you essentially have the same tools as most mastering engineers.

[00:26:19] So what's the point in mastering, right? Yeah. Well, and this is a complicated conversation, and I would say, let me begin it with, with was saying this the most important question and mixing and mastering and recording and writing, you name it is this, why do humans like music. Let me say it one more time.

[00:26:41] Why do humans like music? And the answer to that question is I don't freaking know. I don't have any idea why humans like music. Why? When I listened to Bob Dylan the other day is the freewill and Bob Dylan record. Why would I listen to that record? Do I get goosebumps and get like weepy? What the heck is happening there?

[00:27:02] I don't have any idea. It doesn't make any sense. It seems like. Kind of lame and fruity or something. Then I would get emotional, like listening to like a recording of some guy in a room by himself. It's weird. It's self-help in another way. Yeah, man. So I think it all comes back to that. Why do humans like music?

[00:27:21] And I think the most important thing to embrace in this conversation of what is mastering, why master? Why hire a mastering engineer, et cetera. It gets down to this weird question of why do humans like music we don't know. And a good mastering engineer, in my opinion, you can measure their results with only one thing.

[00:27:40] And that's the number of goosebumps on your left arm when you listened to their work. Specifically your left, specifically your left, it's gotta be your left. Your right doesn't count. It's gotta be your left below the elbow between the wrist. So when you listen to a song, whatever engages you more emotionally is better.

[00:27:59] That's it. There's not like, Ooh, it's a little, this one's 13 loaves and no one's full 14.2 and none of this stuff matters except in the service of goosebumps. And. That's the most important thing. And a good mastering engineer has some sort of ability to make a song more goose bumpy. And so yeah, there's EKU.

[00:28:19] Yeah, there's compression, but in my opinion, a lot of it is a good mastering engineer knows when to stop doing those things. He or she does just enough. And then they get to the point of peak awesomeness, peak goosebumps, and they stop being like, well, open to put on accelerator and a BBE Sonic maximizer on this are the two last goosebumps up.

[00:28:42] Three less goosebumps at that point. Like it's really difficult to stop. It's really difficult to have the, the, the ability to know when enough is enough and when you've got it as awesome as you possibly can. And that, um. It's almost like a type of emotional intelligence, much less than like a scientific.

[00:29:02] Or a technical intelligence that I think makes a good mastering engineer, a good master and engineer. So yeah, on on one level you hit the nail on the head that pretty much everybody has access to basically the same tools a mastering engineer has. There's definitely like some crazy voodoo technology stuff here of like it takes a certain type of audio engineer to really be able to kick ass with a multi-band compressor.

[00:29:28] On the master bus, there's just like, you know, how many different possible settings can you come up with, with something like, you know, the waves, you know, Lin and MB, I mean, like literally millions of possible combinations of settings just from that one plugin. So yeah, there's some, there's some technology there.

[00:29:45] Yeah, there's some knowledge. Yeah, there's some science, but everything, and this is what I'm driving at, is the whole goosebumps thing is about making better art. Everything you do as a mastering engineer is in the service of making better art. And when you have somebody that's mastered, you know, tens of thousands of songs or thousands of songs, they're going to probably make art better than someone who's made hundreds of songs.

[00:30:10] So, yeah, yeah. There's this level of like technical expertise, but ultimately like, and gear, but ultimately like, it's not uncommon to find someone that has like. You know, a hundred thousand dollars worth of gear that's not very good at mastering. Yeah. It's, that doesn't make you good. Yeah. It doesn't make you good.

[00:30:28] It doesn't help you make more goosebumps making, Oh, my voice cracked there. It doesn't help you make more goosebumps. What helps you make more goosebumps is basically like emotional maturity. The ability to be like, I'm going to stop. There's a little voice in the back of my head, like my conscience that tells me like, you know, when I should stop yelling at my wife or when I should, you know, help the old lady across the street who fell under driveway.

[00:30:55] That like compulsion also tells you that's enough. Chris, stop messing with there with how their song sounds and that discipline to stop, I think is much more important than like. Well, I got, um, I'll have 17 different types of dealer, which I can apply to this master. I'll have chosen the number 14, because of a maximum dynamic, uh, range, copulation, blahbity, blah, like all that stuff.

[00:31:21] It only helps if it's in the service. The more it goosebumps for sure. I love that. That's a great way of putting it. I always say it like when it comes to a mixing, your job is to create that emotional attachment to the listener. And if you don't do that, you failed. It does. It doesn't matter if the mix kind of sucks, but like bad emotional attachments still there like that, that ultimately rules.

[00:31:40] Amen. Well, in case in point, dude, go listen to anything for Motown in the early sixties I was just about to say that. That's amazing. Yeah. So go listen to my girl classic song from the temptations, one of the greatest songs of all time. The mix is so bad. It's terrible. It's like grading and harsh and overly bright and exhausting to listen to.

[00:32:04] But damn, is that a good song? There's one of those mixes. I don't know if it's my girl, it might be one of the other temptations songs, but there is this like woodblock hit that's in the middle of a song and it's like, it's like 30 DB louder than everything else in the mix. And every time I hear it, I'm like, how the hell did that slip?

[00:32:21] But I'm like, you know what? In the end, it doesn't matter. Like the song is so amazing song. Like, are you talking about the, uh. Shotgun, get him for the run. Now maybe I thought of that. Or like the way you do the things you do or something like that. Oh, one of those songs. There's like, yeah, it's something that just jumps right out.

[00:32:40] They're all so bad, but they're also good because Barry Gordy, for whatever reason, he knew how to make goosebumps, dude. And like that magic was incredible. So side note, um. About 12 years ago, my wife and I were driving. We were going to go on vacation up in the pinky finger of Michigan, and so we drove through Detroit and I had heard that you could literally tour Hitsville USA where they recorded more number one hits than any other room on earth.

[00:33:09] It's amazing. And side note, more number one hits in a racist, toxic white supremacy society as a bunch of African Americans in Detroit. Fricking amazing, coolest thing ever. And it was one of the most amazing trips in my life, cause we, we got in, um, like we waited in line. We were the only white people there.

[00:33:32] It was like hundreds, and it was like this massive African-American like family reunion. And so we get into the snake pit, which is the room they recorded all this in. And, uh. It was like the highlight of my life. So the, the tour guide was like, all right, well, we're going to get, you know, we need like four guys to sing background on my girl and we need one guy to sing lead.

[00:33:53] We're going to, we're going to do like a sing along in the room. And so you get these four, you know, old African American dudes and they're like, all right, who, who else can see who can sing lead? And this lady was like older African American. He looks over me and she says, she says, the whole crowd, that white boy, it looks like he can sing.

[00:34:09] And I was like, Oh. And so it was like one of the most, one of the greatest moments, cause I was like, this is it. Like this is magic. I'm just going to lean into this. And so they start singing the background of my girl and I just like lock eyes with my wife and I just let it belt like from the top of my lungs.

[00:34:31] And it was just so fun because this was, this is an area that I love where this conversation is going with Motown because they have. Overcome more technical issues in their songs, like their recordings are just absolutely awful. Yeah. And but they're there. But the quality of the songs, how much people love them is just massively outsizes the quality of the mix.

[00:34:57] Now I'm not saying we should intentionally make bad recordings. But we shouldn't get so distracted by fidelity that we end up crushing the soul of the song. And who's to say that like a better sounding version of my girl would have been a better, a better hit. There was some weird magic that they dialed in that they focused on the right things, and there's a lot more to learn from that.

[00:35:23] Then, uh, here, here's how you, uh, uh, set the attack on a limiter. Uh, you know, so. Yeah, I love that. I was talking to, who was that? I was talking to yesterday, Mark Eckert. We had this guy, Mark Eckerd on the show yesterday on the podcast. We haven't released it yet. It's coming out pretty soon, but he mentioned about there's nothing more powerful than a song.

[00:35:45] The song rules all and everything else is almost irrelevant. Um, I bet someday there's going to be a number one smash hit on the radio that some kid recorded on his iPhone by himself. The song's just going to be that good and no one's going to care that it sounds like trash. It's just that good. And I think for us as audio engineers, we like to convince ourselves that the fidelity is.

[00:36:11] The King is not. Amen. Amen, brother. Yeah, so I also did the Motown tour as well, and like, it's, it's the coolest place. And when you get into like the snake pit, like you said, you look around and you're like, this is, this is it. Like, this is where they made all these hits, like shitty garage and you know, you just have like a couple of mics hanging from the ceiling and we get so fixated on all of this gear and we need to like multi mic everything and have like the most expensive compressor and blah, blah blah.

[00:36:41] And it's like, no, like at the end of the day, like that was all like. The song was the King. And it didn't matter what year they had, they, they probably have the budgets to add more mikes if they wanted, but then, yeah, you know. Well, and what's so cool about it is they made a lot of stuff. Yeah. So like, I'm sure you saw this too, but when they gave you the tour of the upstairs and Hitsville reverb chamber, the reverb, Oh my God.

[00:37:06] So like back to what we were just saying about, uh, I think it's called shotgun or checkin wedding or something like that. I forget the name of the song, but at the beginning of the song is. Bang shot gun, get him 40 run now. And so when you're walking through the upstairs of the studio, there's an attic access panel that's been removed, like a normal house attic access.

[00:37:26] And what they did is they hired this 1819 year old kid and he went up in the attic. With a bunch of plaster and he plastered everything. So every, every surface in that attic is smooth. And they put a Bullhorn on one side of the attic and a microphone on the other side of the attic. And when they wanted to reverb, they would send signal from the board with an ox to the bull horn, and they use another channel on the mixing board as the return, which was the microphone in the attic.

[00:37:55] And it was so crazy to like, I'll never forget, I walked up to that attic access. Reach my hands in the air and clapped and heard that reverb and was like, Oh man, that is it. That is exactly my experience and it's the most real thing cause that that is that Motown sound like, yeah, in a clap for sure. Yeah.

[00:38:15] Literally like that moment of just like, Oh gosh. The most nerdy audio thing in the world, but it's not fidelity. Like it's not a clean, gorgeous, like sparkling, just it's distinctive. It's memorable. And that might be, honestly, this is an interesting place to take this conversation. That might be one of the things that made Motown so successful is they had something better than fidelity.

[00:38:41] They were distinctive. When a Motown song came on the radio, you know, it's a Motown song. Even if you've never heard the record before. Absolutely. Even if you've never heard that song, you're immediately like, Oh, this has gotta be Motown because nothing sounds like this. So to that end, I think there's almost an argument to focus more on being distinct and instantly recognizable.

[00:39:04] Having a, uh, uh, a swag, if you will, that people are like, Oh, that's. That's Mike's record. That sounds like a Mike record. So if you've got something like that that might, there might be more buried in the secrets of what is a hit record, what makes a hit in that distinctive, like sort of weirdness, you know?

[00:39:27] I don't know, man. This is all like, this is mystical. Yeah. Stuff that we're talking about. It's like mysteries that like anyone that's like, well, I can answer that question for you. I'm like, Oh, you're full of crap. Nobody knows. Like it's all missing. For sure. So then let me, let me take a step back from that conversation then and ask you, what is your current studio setup like these days?

[00:39:48] Are you mainly in the box? Do you have a bunch of analog gear? Does that matter to you anymore? Okay. So, no, I'm not really an analog gear guy, you know, for me, um, I'm aware that most of the time when you get a project. Some corners were cut at the mixing stage or the production stage stage or whatever, and as a result, I think that the recall ability of the mix and the recall ability of the master is more important than almost anything else because you want to be able to have the artists say, Oh man, can we turn the vocal up a little bit?

[00:40:24] Yeah, sure. Send me a new mix. I'll have it for you later today. That sort of speed to me seems more important than like. Then. Then I think the main point of the analog gear is to impress people. Yeah. It's to post pictures on Instagram. It's to have people come over to the studio and be like, Oh gosh, you must know what you're doing.

[00:40:41] You're cause you're really in debt. Like you've really gone all out. So I typically stay in the box. Very rarely. Really. I haven't, it's been a pretty long time since I've done anything out of the box. But for me, I think mastering is mostly about making the right decision. Mostly about stopping when you've done enough and then mostly about having the flexibility to make quick changes.

[00:41:07] So for me, um, I love being in the box. My fantasy that I'm working on right now, it's like I've got. Cool set up here. I've got like, uh, you know, Bowers and Wilkins speakers and a really kick ass vintage tube amp that drives them and, uh, crane song avocets the same front end everybody on, on in the world has, that's mastering for a full time.

[00:41:28] It sounds great. It's awesome. But my fantasy. Um, and there's a couple of guys that have done this, um, as well. My fantasy is to eventually be headphone only, is to be the headphone mastering or a headphone mastering guy. Cause there's other guys. And the big thing for me there, um, is one, I'm obsessed with headphones.

[00:41:49] They're all, they've always been one of my favorite items on earth because I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family and headphones, like this instant cave that you could have privacy in and go into your own world and escape. So I have a really, um. Intense emotional attachment to headphones. So it feels more natural to me in some ways to work with headphones, but I'm not there yet.

[00:42:11] Um, it's like anything else, you know, you get new monitors, it takes a while to get used to them. You know, you get a new dog, it takes a while to get used to it. I am in the process of trying to get used to mastering on the headphones. Um, I've been using. Uh, sonar works and these, uh, they sent me these Sennheiser six fifties that they had calibrated.

[00:42:29] Um, it's one of the benefits of having a podcast. You get lots of like free stuff, but they sent me these six fifties, and it's been, uh, for the first time I've been like, Oh yeah, I could master with headphones. I know what I'm doing, which is a crazy software. I actually just got it like last week and was starting to mess around with it.

[00:42:47] And it's crazy. Yeah. So, and for those of you guys that don't know about it, so when it works as like. There's a couple of different types of it. The cheapest kind is like you plug in a pair of headphones, you tell sonar works, what headphones you're using, and you route all your audio to this program and it corrects the EEQ curve of the headphones.

[00:43:05] So you get like rule or flat frequency response. And even with like these custom ones that they calibrated, they like calibrate the difference between drivers. So like there's a little bit of difference between like. You know, frequency. There's like a half a DB more 5k in the left driver than there is in the right driver and it equals all that out.

[00:43:25] And when I first got this pair of headphones from sonar works, shout out, Lee, thank you so much. Um, when I first got this stuff, it was like, Whoa, okay. That was the push I needed to have more confidence when I'm mastering the headphones because my biggest problem when I'm, when I'm working with headphones is sometimes you get in this like, weird.

[00:43:45] Like disoriented state because like your ears are covered and suddenly the rest of the world around you. Yeah. It can get disorienting and all of a sudden you're like, what's my name? And then who am I? Which way is up? Like where like it's can get really disorienting. And sonar works has really helped me figure that out.

[00:44:05] So I'm, I would say I'm like 90% of the way there. Um, I have not. Been brave enough to like take a laptop on the road for a long period of time and just work for my clients with headphones. But that's the dream is that someday when I feel like I'm ready, I w I want to like kill all the sacred cows and be like, yeah, I master your record on.

[00:44:25] Really fancy headphones. Really fancy converter, a really fancy headphone amp and my Mac book. Yep. And do a good job. Cause that'd be obviously that be a thing and people will be like, really headphones mastering. Well that's the thing is in rock it's a little less common. But in other genres, this is, there are hits like that have been smash hits.

[00:44:46] On the radio that had been J Cole stuff. Yeah. For example, J Cole stuff mastered on any of your headphones. Whoa, cool. Amazing. Brave new world. Yup. For sure. I'd love to talk a little bit about your website because obviously that's been a major source of driving customers to your business and, and um, I think there's a lot of people out there, myself included, who like.

[00:45:08] Have this idea of when you want to make a presence for yourself online, you build yourself a website and you put your bio on there, you put some samples of your audio in there, and a lot of people just let it sit expecting this kind of, if you build it, they will come kind of idea and yeah. You have managed to figure out a way of driving a ton of traffic and converting a lot of customers through your website.

[00:45:32] I think that's amazing. So I was wondering if you can go into a little bit of detail on how you went about doing that and drove the traffic to it. I know you'd kind of mentioned ads earlier. Well to call a spade a spade. I feel really lucky and blessed and that I happened to be good at it at at least three things.

[00:45:53] Um. I think in today's environment, in music, if you're only good at one thing, you're going to have a really hard time running a business. I lucked out in that I am primarily a learner and a problem solver. That's what I enjoy doing the most, more than anything. Um, so that makes me a good mastering engineer.

[00:46:12] At least it helps a lot. Um, that makes me a good marketer, or at least it helps a lot and it makes me really good at building systems, or at least it helps a lot. So for me, um, I lucked out in that I was good at mastering in the first place. There was like some natural ability there. And, and, um, for whatever reason, I, I've, I've good ears.

[00:46:34] And that'd been the case like, since I was a kid, like, I could, you know, uh, as a piano student, um. I'm gonna brag a little bit. I hate doing that, but I think this is important to recognize are important. Excuse me too. To explain, like as a piano student, as a kid, we would play this game. We were Suzuki method, so it's ear training, and the game would be like, I'm going to play either five or four or three notes from a song, and then you have to tell me what song it is.

[00:47:01] Just from those few notes and for whatever reason I could consistently identify all the songs that contained two note combinations. And so this was like weird and I like was dropped as a baby. I fell down the stairs and hit my head and maybe this has something to do with it, but, um, true story. Fell on the stairs, passed out, woke up.

[00:47:22] It was crazy. It was like nine months old. I remember it like it was yesterday, which is creepy. Really weird. Psychology. I should go see a shrink probably about this. And then that moment made your hearing infinitely better. It was like the movie rookie of the year with Henry rolling. It's like one of the most underrated movies ever.

[00:47:38] And he throws that pitch when he catches the ball and throws it back and Oh, we got more talent in the stands and we get on the field today. I love that movie. I need to watch that with my kids. But this is a real thing, like there are, um, people who have sustained brain injuries and then they have more skill than they did before.

[00:47:55] Maybe that happened to me. Maybe it didn't. I don't know. Anyways, long story short, I've got good ears. I've got like some taste, some talent or whatever you want to call that there. Thank God. Um, I can't take any credit for that. I, I won the lottery there. Um, but the, the most important thing, I think from a website standpoint to really get to your question here.

[00:48:17] Was, I think the mistake that most people make in the audio business is they look around at what everyone else is doing and they copy it and they say, Oh, this must be the normal thing to do. I'm going to copy it. And we're notorious for this. So case in point, I know like, I'm gonna like get crucified here, but like  you know, like they're awful.

[00:48:38] Oh God, they're so, they're so bad. They're not even studio monitors. They're cheap. Like consumer speakers from the 1970s and they're just, they're not good. But, but one guy had a hit, makes it an NF stands, and then everybody was like, Oh, well that must've been the secret. I'll get NSNs. And like, not that you can't do a great mix on , but like.

[00:49:01] This is like, why? Why would you see the  and say, Oh yeah, that's, that's the secret. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with low fi speakers for now. CLA was out there saying, no, the sound of hits, or he's gracious. Yeah. So don't get me started there. So yeah, so we're a copycat industry. As much as we would love to believe that we're this rock and roll, do your own thing.

[00:49:22] And like that's the nature of rock and roll is like. I do what I want. I'm different. And I embraced it. And I think for the website thing, most people make the mistake of like, I'm going to make my website look like all my competitors. Newsflash, you can't build a business by copying your competitors. If, if you do, your only chance at building a business is to execute much better than they can.

[00:49:44] And if you look at somebody that's 15 years ahead of you and you copy what they're doing, they have 15 years of experience. Unless you're a flipping genius, you're not going to out execute them. The easiest way to do something that a work on a website is to do something that nobody else is doing. Stand out.

[00:50:02] Be unique. Do what Motown did have mixes that sound kind of weird. I'm not saying that that's the, that was their secret, but like, they were distinctive. If your website isn't distinctive, no one's going to remember you. You're just going to, they're going to be like, Oh, I went on like five mixing websites to do.

[00:50:18] Uh, and they can't even like, think of what your name is. They can't think of like, they can't even describe. What made you unique? So like you can compete on price, you can compete on speed, you can compete on quality, you can compete on like some other weird X factor of like, you know, we'll record you remotely over video chat, or will you send us your mix with your plugins on it and we'll take it from there.

[00:50:42] There's all sorts of things you can do to be unique. And if you want a website that converts, you have to do something nobody else is doing. And so that's sort of the frustrating. Part of like me giving out business information on the podcast on six figure studio podcast is ultimately you have to differentiate.

[00:51:00] That's the key. You have to do something that's like, Whoa, cool. I've never seen that before. Bookmark. That's the key. So. For me, it's not that I did any particular one. Any one thing particularly well, it's that I did at least one thing really, really differently. And to this day, like there's other people that do the before and after thing live, but it's not kind of as cool as on my website.

[00:51:25] It looks like this weird analog piece of gear and it feels like a toy. Like you're playing with it and you get to experiment and people love that. And as a result, like. Um, one of the best things to do when you have a website is to get Google analytics set up on it so that you can see like how many people are on it, how long they're staying, or they're going, like on my Google analytics, people typically hang out on my website for, I think it's three and a half to four minutes, depending on the time of the year.

[00:51:49] That's the average time on site. And that is a monster amount of time to see on Google analytics. But it's mostly because like that before and after machine is fun. Yeah. Yeah. So people are spending a lot of time goofing around with that machine. And getting a feel for is this somebody I want to work with.

[00:52:06] So, yeah. So to bring it home, like the most important thing is to do something unique. To do something that's like surprising and singular, and think about it. Think of all your favorite bands you've ever listened to. Like nobody's a gigantic, no offense to anybody. No one's a gigantic like puddle of mud fan because puddle of mud sounds like creed and it sounds like Nickelback and it's, it's not distinctive.

[00:52:30] Yeah. So all your favorite bands are totally singular. They're totally weird. And if that's not the case, I don't know that we can be friends, but I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But, but everything, think about everything that you like. It's. Bizarre. Yeah, it's unique. It stands out. So I'm drinking a can of Pompa moose LaCroix right now.

[00:52:52] I'm a huge fan. Who would have ever thought 10 years ago that one of the number one selling beverages in the United States would be sparkly water with just a little bit of grapefruit oil in it and no sugar. Weird. It's a very strange beverage, but because it is, it stands out in a crowd. And I think that's the most important thing.

[00:53:12] You know, any of you audio engineers that are listening, any of you musicians that are, that are listening, can take them to, is that if, if it's really easy to define your genre, um, it's probably not going to go super well for you. Yeah. You know, the, all the best acts ever were like, had invented a genre in some way, shape or form.

[00:53:32] And you look at even like a couple of years ago, Mumford and sons exploded. What the heck is Mumford and sons is a bluegrass? No. Is it like indie rock? No. Is it like folk? No. Like it's, it's really hard to define Adele. Same. You know? Like what the heck is the Dell? Is it R and B? No. Does it pop? No. Like, I don't know what it is and it's as a result, another great example, you know, one of the most popular bands in the world, 21 pilots.

[00:54:02] What on earth is 21 pilots? It's, yeah, it's all toss. It's all, is it pop? Is it rap? I don't, I don't really completely know what it is. There's a humility. It's like there's some rap and there's some pop, but there's a humility to their music. And, uh. It kills it for them. So I think a big part of this, and this is true across all art and across all business, is that only the unique ones rise to the top.

[00:54:30] Absolutely. And it's one thing to have that differentiating factor. Like you said, though, you could have put that before and after player on your website, but. If no one went to your website, it wouldn't have mattered. So, so that's true. How do you get people to check out your website? You mentioned ads, but is that the only way?

[00:54:49] No. So, um, so my story is I got the website up and running and I found somebody who could build it for me. And I lucked out. This was just a stroke of luck that one of the best, um, user interface designers around happened to be a friend of mine. And so he builds websites that people interact with, they play with.

[00:55:10] It makes it a toy. I was really lucky that he knew how he, he was able to figure out how to build this. Um. And then I was really lucky that I'm a complete nerd and got completely OCD about learning how to run paid ads on Google. At the time, there were not many people competing in the mastering space for paid ads.

[00:55:30] And so I went in, learned a bunch of stuff and crushed it. And then later on, I would, you know, every couple of years I would redefine how I was marketing myself and where I was marketing myself and I would crush it. And again, and again. Um. Back to what I said before. There's not like a one size fits all for marketing.

[00:55:49] You have to do it in a unique way, in a unique space. There's not like, well, if you're a mastering lead, you just need to run this type of ad. If I give that advice out and every master and engineer begins to take it, it will no longer work for any mastering engineers. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes sense.

[00:56:05] Well, I was going to ask about that, like what do you suggest people do in terms of their ad copy to differentiate themselves? Because I'm sure it's not enough to just say like, Hey, I'm a, I'm Mike, I'm a mastering engineer from Toronto. Check out my studio, click here. Like totally probably not going to get many hits.

[00:56:20] Yeah. Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to have some kind of lead magnet. And so for me, my lead magnet is all master one song for free for any artist. And if you're a mix engineer producer, I'll master one song for free for all of your artists. So this sort of like, Hey, come here, give me a try.

[00:56:39] You can get something for free. There's no cost to you, it's no risk. There's only potential upside for the customer. So figuring out something like that. For whatever the business is, is an easy way to get attention. And especially if you are putting that message out in the right context. So like case in point, right now I'm marketing.

[00:57:01] Like, I'm on an audio web on an audio podcast, and I'm talking about getting a free mastering sample. And at least some of you were like, Hmm, interesting. But like at the same time, I'm not trying to market, I'm just trying to help people. And I think that's a, that's a big, let me massively shift this conversation.

[00:57:18] Sure. Is that. You have to help people. If you are in audio and you're thinking, well, I just want to like be a professional audio engineer, so my mom, uh, will stop judging me. Like if that's your driving motivation and it's about you, it's about you getting paid, quote unquote, what you're worth. It ain't gonna work.

[00:57:39] If you're out there trying to help as many people as you possibly can, you're going to win. And like, you're going to, the side effect of helping people is success. Absolutely. So that's huge. And so for me, I was like, Hey, people don't understand what mastering is. I'm going to help them understand what my player, and then I'm gonna help them understand what mastering can do for them by giving them a free sample.

[00:58:01] And probably I'm going to call them. Well, I'm working on their sample and talk to them about their mix and give them free mixing advice. If they decide to book a mastering project with me, I'll give them free mixing advice and it helps them turn out a better product. And the more you help people, the better your business is gonna is going to go.

[00:58:16] And I think that's probably the biggest misconception I see. And like all this like, well, how do you market? Or how do you master? Well, how do you all, all of these things all come back to how do you help the most people? And you can't help that many people by being like everyone else. You have to offer unique help.

[00:58:34] That's the way you help the most people. But essentially like business, the marketplace, capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is a race. And he or she, that helps the most people, the most wins. And like, I'm a student of history. I read business history books all the time. That's the case in every successful business.

[00:58:54] So case in point, um. Johnny Rockefeller, you know I say that name and immediately people are like, Oh, you must've been availing. Aw man, it's too bad that Scooby doo, when those kids weren't around back then cause they would've caught him pertaining to be the monster. I don't want to get away with the two if it wasn't for you pesky kids like this.

[00:59:12] This idea of like him as a villain and he wasn't perfect. He was definitely really gross in some ways, b