wohnzimmer weiß matt
hey folks, matthew weiss here, welcome tothe new monday, wednesday, friday video log, courtesy of the pro audio files. i'll be your host, matt weiss. normally, in every show, i'm going to do afeaturette, but since today is the very, very first of these, the featurette is going tobe on me so you know who i am. i guess you don't really need to know thatmuch, but the basic gist of it is i'm a music producer/audio engineer, i've been workingin the business for about a decade, maybe a decade and a half depending on how you definethe word, “working,†and i've been working on some pretty cool projects.
i'm not going to brag, but there's a discographyand all that kind of stuff. anyway, suffice to say, i've been teachingfor awhile, i've been working for awhile, a lot of good things have happened. now, a couple little background tidbits onme. my parents were both artists, my father wasa bass player, my mother was a sculpturist, they're both retired and in different businessesnow, but i grew up with that background, and i carried music with my all throughout mychildhood, getting into high school, i was working the sound board pretty often at allof the school plays and functions. even in college, i was working as a soundtech.
went to school originally for creative writing,but i decided that i was going to switch over to music, because at the time in my life,i wanted to be danny elfman. i mean, let's be real, who wouldn't want tobe danny elfman? those scores are amazing! anyway, that didn't really pan out exactlythe way i wanted. well, maybe a little bit, but it sort of occurredto me that it wasn't so much that i wanted to be necessarily making music all the time,it's just that i really loved music. it's always been in me, it's always been somethingi've been interested in, and so i started veering off toward the field of not so muchmaking my own music, but helping other people
make theirs. that's come in a number of different forms,whether it's been producing bedding tracks, helping other people produce bedding tracks,adding instrumentation, or recording and mixing the recordings themselves. so this eventually turned into a career. took a little while to get off the ground,and i would say the most important thing that made this work was that i started bummingmyself up to new york, where i met up with a gentleman named mark marshall, who tookme under as an apprentice, and i met up with a woman named denise barbarita who did thesame.
those two people have been hugely influentialon my life. they are still people that i rely on to thisday whenever i need advice, or whenever i just need to have a little pat on the backor whatever, and mark actually contributes to this channel as well. then when i got myself back to philadelphia,i decided that i was going to make it as a studio engineer. mind you, this was about 2007, when studiointernships and studio engineering jobs had shrank massively. there had been a lot of studio closures.
so i decided i was going to get in one wayor another, and i started telling everybody around town of philadelphia that i didn'tcare what it would take, i was going to get them into a studio so i can record and workon their music, and that would mean even helping the bands pay for the actual day if need be. so i repeated this process for a little while,and found myself at a place called studio e recording a jazz band, which is owned bya gentleman named bobby eli. he decided that i did a really good job, hewas impressed with what i was doing, and he asked me to come back the following week tohelp him out, and on my very first day, i got to meet damon harris from the temptations,which was pretty cool.
i stayed with bobby for about three years,then moved on to become a freelancer. so that's my story, that's where i'm comingfrom. now, every show, not only will i be featuringsomebody who maybe doesn't get the shine that they deserve, or just deserves the spotlightfor a moment for something, but i will also be featuring something that's happening newin music today, and this week, i'm going to kick it off with something that basically,if you haven't been living under a rock, you've already heard, and that's the controversial,and i don't know why it's so controversial, taylor swift song, “look what you made medo.†so i'm going to play a little bit of it, andthen i'm going to discuss not so much whether
i like it or dislike it, because i don't thinkthat's so important, but perhaps, try and figure out where some of the controversy iscoming from. [music] okay, so obviously, i skipped the verse there,and there's a reason why. i think the controversy really comes aroundthe chorus, or, as what i'd like to point out, the anti-chorus. so what does that mean? well, we've got this pre-chorus where it'ssteadily building. there's a lot of tension in the pre-chorus,there's a lot of these distune things that
are happening, there's a crescendo that'shappening, it's building up, it's building up, it's building up, and then rather thanthis big chorus that has this full out chord that really emphasizes the key of the song,which is what we're really used to hearing, and a top line that's like, a melody that'sreally catchy, it does exactly the opposite. everything disappears and it moves to justa drum beat and a very, very dry vocal that's basically being spoken. so that's called an anti-chorus. it's where you expect big, but you get small. now, we've seen some really successful examplesof this.
one of my favorite has been on the more recentmeghan trainor records we've heard on no and me too, this occurs, and then the anti-chorusturns into a full chorus the second time it passes around, so if you want to check thatout, i'm going to pull them up real quick. so you'll notice that sort of followed thesame format, where there was this big buildup in the pre-chorus, then it dropped to thisvery sparse drum beat, along with a spoken kind of chorus where there really isn't anykind of top line, it's all just sort of said, and there's no real reinforcement of the chord,and then when the chorus goes back to itself for the beat part, that's when it becomesthe actual chorus chorus. so it's a really interesting format whereit goes pre-chorus, anti-chorus, chorus.
but the taylor swift song doesn't do that,and so it commits to this very dark, very stark look on things, which of course, isgoing to polarize people in how they take it. what i will say is that the taylor swift songhas a really, really cool introduction going into the first verse, so if nothing else,you can appreciate that. of course, my opinion is just my opinion,and it's not the only opinion, so what do you think of the taylor swift song? do you think it's well produced? do you think it's well written?
do you hate it? do you love it? do you hate it and love it? let me know in the comments section what youthink, and maybe don't just comment what you think, but maybe also throw down why, becausethat's really what music production is about. understanding why people receive things theway that they do. now, the third thing that i plan on doingevery episode is going to be something that features a technique that centers around apiece of equipment, or some kind of technological development that i happen to be particularlyfond of.
this week, i'm going to be featuring the blackbox hg-2 by analog designs that's founded by my friend eric racy. this is a really, really cool plugin modeledoff of a hardware unit that he built awhile back. it's pretty new to me, i'm still getting usedto it, it has a lot of moving parts in its controls, but what it does is it uses distortionto create various textural effects that can draw the ear to the sound, or grind the livingsnot out of it, depending on what you're trying to do. usually, i'm trying to draw ears to the sound.
anyway, i'm going to play the before and after,and show you what i mean. alright, here we are without it. [mix, no hg-2] and now listen to the low end. [mix, with hg-2] so i'm giving it just a little bit of coloron all of the low end elements, meaning the kick, the bass synth, and the 808. all of it is going to one buss, which is thenbeing ground up just a little bit in this analog box, black box designs hg-2.
it's got like, five names. bear with me. alright, so here we are in solo mode withoutit. [low end soloed, no hg-2] and with. [low end, with hg-2] so it's very subtle. i'm not really changing much with it, andwhat i can show you is that i've got these little two gain stages set in a way that ifeel compliments the sound.
this triode kind of gives things a littlebit of glow and pop in the upper-mids. it's not quite as full as the pentode, butit's a little bit more pointed, and the pentode is a little bit more of even and odd harmonics,so it's giving a fuller and grittier sound. in this case, i wanted something that wasa bit more pointed and a bit more subtle, so i'm leaning more on the triode than onthe pentode, but what i can do right now is i can go in the other direction here. if i lean on the pentode... [low end, pentode engaged] so that difference is subtle, but when i leanmore on the pentode, i get what i would describe
as a pillowier, sort of chewier sound, whereaswhen i lean more on the triode, i get sort of a more polished and pointed sound, althoughboth do do a little bit of rounding to the overall sound in general. alright, let's hear it in the mix again. without. with. and chewy pentode, just for fun. [mix, pentode engaged] actually kind of has a cool sound in the mixwith leaning more on the pentode, but anyway,
what i really want to point out is i'm usingdistortion, not so much to actually distort the sound, but i'm using that color and thatlittle bit of extra kind of compression that's happening to draw the ear to the sound. in a way, i'm using distortion to make somethingclearer, which is a little counter-intuitive, but kind of a cool effect. so if you've got the black box analog designhg-2, drop a little something in the comments section. give me a tip on a way that i could use it. how are you using it?
because i'm pretty new to this thing, there'sa lot of moving parts, and maybe i could learn something for sure. also, if you're doing a similar techniqueto what i just demonstrated, i would love to hear what you're using to do that, if notthis particular plugin. let me know. alright guys, this show is brought to youby you, so if you dig what i'm doing, click that like button, and click that subscribebutton if you want to get more of it, more content, more great information on music production. also, we've got a lot of cool things thatyou can check out in the description section.
a lot of cool links, a lot of good tutorials,one of the ones that's coming up is mixing with reverb, it's coming out september 18th,it's something i made so you can understand what reverb is, what it does, and how to useit in your music production. alright guys, i'll catch you on wednesday.