An Interview with Rob Maile

1:55 Luke F. Walton what's good everybody welcome back to love music more i am Scoobert Doobert and i am joined with Rob Maile rob welcome to the show

2:05 Rob Maile Thanks for having me.

2:05 Luke F. Walton So I'm super excited to talk about your first record, St. Nick the Lesser, and that kind of whole journey. And then I'm also very excited to talk about your path, obviously with all the sick gear behind you and your work at AEA Microphones. So welcome to the show. Maybe tell people a little bit about kind of like what you do and where your role in the industry is and then we'll dive deeper.

2:30 Rob Maile Sure. I'm a producer engineer located in the Los Angeles area. I went to Musicians Institute in Hollywood. And yeah, like you said, I did my produce my first record in 2025. I do also work for for AEA microphones.

2:50 Luke F. Walton That's awesome. Well, I think that maybe that'd be a fun place to start because every recording journey starts with the microphone.

2:56 Luke F. Walton phone um how does the microphone even work what are the different types of microphones we're both speaking into the same microphone for those on the video but what what makes a dynamic microphone versus like a ribbon microphone for example maybe people have heard those words but they don't actually know what they mean other than they cost different amounts of money

3:16 Rob Maile Yeah, well, a microphone is a type of transducer, which is an electrical device that translate sound into electricity. So there are different types of transducer elements that live inside of the microphone. Two of the ones that you mentioned in two types are dynamic, which uses a strong magnet and a coil, a ribbon microphone, which is what we make at AEA, which is is a very thin corrugated strip of metal.

3:55 Rob Maile It's only a few microns thick. So this is orders of magnitude thinner than a human hair suspended in between two magnets. And when you create a sound and the air vibrates and causes the ribbon to vibrate, then it creates a voltage on the output of the ribbon, which goes through a transformer.

4:18 Rob Maile sometimes through other components and you get sound and the other there there's some less common extinct types of microphones but the other most common that you'll come across are condenser microphones which use a electrostatically charged capsule so they they need some kind of voltage we call it phantom power 48 volts typically it biases the microphone and

4:46 Rob Maile when a sound hits between the two sides the two poles of the capsule they vibrate you end up with a voltage they're usually more sensitive because you're supplying some energy to them they're used in all ribbons condensers dynamic mics like they're used in all different applications in music and recording

5:08 Luke F. Walton That's really fascinating. For people that are looking at our heads, we have headphones on and behind you, you have a speaker. Can you talk about maybe the connection or the inverse relationship of like a dynamic microphone versus like the speaker that you might have?

5:20 Rob Maile Yeah, it's interesting. Their dynamic mics are, like I said, a coil and a magnet, and you have those two components.

5:30 Rob Maile those two components make up a speaker um there are some differences in terms of like the coil and the magnet you find in here are a little different because they're designed to do different things but like what you can do um and what a lot of diy producers like me um a very common use for that is they'll if you wire um like the the woofer from like a studio monitor or just some small speaker

5:58 Rob Maile If you wire that directly up to a preamp of some kind and you amplify that sound and you make a sound in front of that speaker, you get voltage. A lot of times they'll use those for kick drums to capture some kind of really low frequency elements of a sound.

6:17 Luke F. Walton Totally. No, I remember when I was using one of those fancy subkicks that are like housed in the whole capsule, and then I went to a more DIY studio and they just had this sub, like a subwoofer, the woofer just pressed up against the kick and it was all janky looking because it was all hand wired. I ended up doing the same thing when I had my own studio because it's the presentation. It's the same thing.

6:41 Rob Maile That's a little scary, isn't

6:42 Luke F. Walton It's

6:42 Rob Maile it?

6:42 Luke F. Walton a little scary.

6:43 Rob Maile You don't know if an artist can... artist comes in and they're like is this like was it like a full-size like 15 inch woofer oh man

6:51 Luke F. Walton no i think it was a 12 i don't think it was full size

6:54 Rob Maile okay

6:54 Luke F. Walton i think that's it was 12 yeah

6:54 Rob Maile still kind of crazy like i'm fine just using you know something that you can hold in your hand at the very least oh

7:02 Luke F. Walton exactly yeah it was like uh held together by one of the pieces of drum hardware that like hold a piccolo snare i guess that's a

7:10 Rob Maile the

7:11 Luke F. Walton cloth

7:11 Rob Maile little yeah

7:11 Luke F. Walton Wow.

7:11 Rob Maile oh

7:12 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

7:12 Rob Maile man yeah yeah

7:14 Luke F. Walton Yeah. It worked though. It was cool. I mean, it's funny because now like there are plugins that kind of can do the same-ish thing with like subharmonic, you know, artificial versions of a subkick, but there is something special about just like, yeah, just capture the movement of the air and get those low frequencies rather than just emulating it with a sine wave or something.

7:33 Rob Maile yeah also as a keyboard player i've found some some interesting other uses for subkicks like we've We've

7:40 Rob Maile Okay. we've tried it on on Hammond organ like miking up a Leslie speaker because you typically mic like the upper horn separately from the the lower drum. So yeah, like I've Found some interesting, cool results doing that, just experimenting.

8:00 Luke F. Walton I bet. And I think that non-traditional low-end is an underexplored part of music recording just because the traditional thing is just you scoop it all out. But sometimes there's some magic living in the rumble, particularly on something as weird as a Hammond organ. It's so mechanical.

8:19 Rob Maile Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times, like you said, a lot of keys get... high past and rolled off so you lose some of the the presence or the authority of

8:32 Luke F. Walton Sure.

8:32 Rob Maile an instrument like a like a hammond

8:34 Luke F. Walton Right.

8:34 Rob Maile like a b3 when you're sitting in the room you know i happen to live with an organ player and it's just like i feel you feel it in in your chest like sitting even just 10 feet away from the leslie and these aren't high-powered speakers they're you know 40 watt tube amplifiers

8:51 Rob Maile um but they were engineered in such a way and the cabinet was tuned in such a way that you know it's hard to translate that earth-shaking quality um and the you know just the three-dimensionality of a leslie onto a record

9:08 Luke F. Walton yeah i mean that's a really good point that's always been something that yes it's frustrating i'm a guitarist and so i remember the first time that i recorded and obviously high pass and all the normal things it's a you know sm57 on it rather than my ear rather than the room and it's just like straight on the cab and i was so disappointed because like it was such a big cool tone and now it's this little tiny mid-rangey thing and same thing with like a hammond when you're kind of doing that big sweep and you kind of feel like that

9:35 Luke F. Walton that pressure build or something same thing on guitar like when you rake into a blues note or something like that that low push is what gives it that yeah authority and that feeling of like a rival like a growl yeah

9:48 Rob Maile Yeah, definitely.

9:51 Luke F. Walton it's interesting too about thinking about like The impression of an instrument in a room versus the impression of an instrument on a recording, because in a lot of ways we're kind of doing smoke and mirrors or it's like a cave painting or we're trying to compress something that manifests itself in three dimensions into something that on a bunch of different speakers,

10:12 Luke F. Walton including like my phone speaker still sounds cool.

10:15 Rob Maile Yeah, and like the reality of that, knowing that 80% of your end user or your listener

10:23 Rob Maile it's that's where they're going to be listening to it like through a phone like all of the labor labor work expensive gear vintage gear you know whatever it is like all

10:33 Luke F. Walton Totally.

10:33 Rob Maile of that And your end speaker is probably going to be, you know, somebody's phone on TikTok or Instagram.

10:40 Luke F. Walton yeah yeah but it's weird though because sometimes the best recorded stuff or the best sounding stuff on the really good speakers is also the best sounding stuff on the really small speakers because it's like almost has fidelity to compress versus if your fidelity is already like really low or you've over compressed your entire mix and then it goes on the radio or it goes on tiktok or something and there's another layer of

11:02 Luke F. Walton run compression on top of it yeah sometimes it can't hold up as well

11:04 Rob Maile Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably the the mark of any great mix is like how translatable it is across media, different media and yeah, like different speakers.

11:18 Luke F. Walton yeah i i um talked to some non-musicians and one of the things they always ask me is how do you make so many decisions

11:27 Luke F. Walton it's like the decision of like what microphone am i going to use for this given audio source or like your voice or or you know deciding how you're gonna mic a guitar or a drum kit or something like that what are some of the things that you're thinking through or is this all like intuition at this point just from having done it and knowing the gear so well

11:47 Rob Maile Uh, I'd say it's a little bit of both. I'm certainly more on the intuitive side. And when I look at making a record or a song, it's all about like adapting and going, taking things kind of in stride.

12:05 Luke F. Walton Okay.

12:05 Rob Maile I'm not really somebody who likes to kind of not commit to stuff and

12:11 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

12:11 Rob Maile be you know i don't use a lot of like amp modeling or i try to minimize plugins for stuff you know like stuff that's hard to emulate accurately even microphones like i am not much of a outside of mixing and using like a digital audio workstation using pro tools i'm pretty much an analog person like i i want to be able to commit to something and then You know, if there are problems, use the tools available to me,

12:42 Rob Maile whether they are digital or analog, to improvise around the problems and also improvise into new unforeseen cool sounds and

12:56 Luke F. Walton Yes.

12:56 Rob Maile interesting things, interesting moments that for me, like a lot of producers. can do everything in plugins on a laptop i'm not one of those people like i need to have my hands on something to be kind of communing with an instrument or a piece of hardware yeah that's kind of where the inspiration hits and then i can kind of it's like a snowball gets rolling and it keeps going and going and going and then you end up with with a song

13:24 Luke F. Walton Yeah. Well, I like the way you're saying it too about analog gear unlocking the ability to make decisions. I think that's really important, especially in a world where the decisions are limitless and in a digital space where revisions are expected and constant and super zoomed in.

13:44 Luke F. Walton But yeah, if you do something that's unexpected or you bake it into the audio and it was late at night and you forgot that you set the threshold too high or whatever, roll with it, see where it goes.

13:55 Rob Maile Yeah, absolutely. That's definitely my philosophy.

13:59 Luke F. Walton That's really cool. One of the questions I get a lot from folks that listen to this podcast and maybe they're in college, take music appreciation courses, something like that, trying to figure out how do I make money at this? How do I find a career with this?

14:12 Luke F. Walton I think that your situation is really interesting. How did you make your way to AEA? How did you find kind of like the hard engineering plus the soft engineering of like recording engineering?

14:22 Rob Maile And how'd you find that path? Well, I kind of had to forge it for myself and like, this is what I, that's the main thing I would probably suggest to anyone who's young or maybe they're just starting out thinking, can I move towards audio or towards music as any kind of career path or passion? For me, a traditional education was... Nice, but most of my knowledge that I obtained that I use on a regular basis.

15:01 Rob Maile I got from people and from connecting, Yeah. for instance, I got into, you mentioned the technical side of things, you know, the fact that I work at this company building microphones, that manifested because I met Max Butler, the organ player, who is a, he's also a technician, so he works on Hammond's and Leslie's.

15:26 Rob Maile I didn't know anything about the physics or the electronics of sound at that time. This was, you know, many, many years ago. There was just a spark because he showed me he played a Hammond organ and then showed me he like spun the Leslie around. He's like, look at this, see this thing that's spinning and look at those glowing things down there that look like light bulbs.

16:00 Rob Maile I had that person and he was available and nurtured that and I Yeah. you know that led me into musically finding like the true passions because I'm a classically trained musician originally because that's what I had available to me like I went to a performing arts high school that competed in a lot of you know competitions and we would get on the bus and you know and it was a great opportunity getting to

16:25 Rob Maile to learn the theory behind music first because

16:29 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

16:30 Rob Maile not a lot of people that I have come across in the I guess commercial side of music have that that foundation that I was very fortunate to have I'm usually the one who gets handed the like here like we need horn parts can you write sheet music that's correct that these horn players will be able to read and get right the first time or you know string arrangements

16:54 Rob Maile trends and stuff and that's because i had that that training um

16:57 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

16:57 Rob Maile but anyway i i digress i got into the technical side with max that led me to the musical side learning like my true passion instrument wise which is synthesizers particularly

17:10 Luke F. Walton Yes.

17:11 Rob Maile like hardware vintage synthesizers like a lot of people you know they'll be like oh you like synthesizers and then send me all of these these eurorack modular synthesizers that have all kinds of strange names like the bubble machine or you know stuff that like it's such a huge world you know and guitars are fairly similar like you can get into so much yeah

17:36 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

17:36 Rob Maile pedals totally yeah

17:37 Luke F. Walton it's crazy.

17:38 Rob Maile um So, yeah, like nobody when I was a kid was around to even show me something like a synthesizer. Like I didn't even know that it was something that would just capture my imagination and my love, something I can just sit and commune with.

17:53 Rob Maile And that's kind of for me like where the headwaters, that's the spring of where all of like the tributaries of like my musical things that I do, it comes from that of like sitting and communing with an instrument and being a musician. musician because that's what i am first and foremost is an artist

18:10 Luke F. Walton Yeah, let's talk more about synthesizers so you have some cool ones are a little blurry But I think I can make out some of them But why don't you walk us through the the big four that you've got behind you?

18:20 Rob Maile what's sitting here okay so um we've got my pride and joy my desert island instrument the mini moog up there the first portable synthesizer designed by robert moog and it is moog

18:34 Rob Maile Moog for anybody who's listening especially if there's someone who's like getting into music or doesn't know much and you've just seen it written it's a Dutch he was his family was Dutch so it is Moog and don't let anybody tell you yeah like that was a crash course I had in school like pronouncing stuff correctly

18:49 Luke F. Walton Yes.

18:49 Rob Maile Neumann microphones Moog synthesizers so yeah you've got the mini Moog up top there is a Roland Juno 106 another great all-round synthesizer that you'll see a lot like once you have one or or play one you'll realize you're seeing them all over the place like

19:08 Luke F. Walton Oh,

19:08 Rob Maile at

19:08 Luke F. Walton yeah.

19:08 Rob Maile the Grammys this year I was watching the Grammys and Lady Gaga was playing a actually playing both of these a minimo ganda one juno 106 and down on the bottom you can't really see it it's another Roland synthesizer made in Japan in the mid 1980s it's a jx8

19:26 Rob Maile 8p which was when they transitioned away from synthesizers that you could program that had knobs for every little parameter the new high-tech thing was making it all digital and no buttons where you could just select a parameter you'd have to scroll through and it took forever and it was like the worst user experience ever but it was high-tech that was cutting edge at the time it was computer controlled you know at a time when computers took up most of your desk and you know

19:53 Rob Maile had clunky big floppy disks like to store your word processing and your recipe book or whatever yeah that one i recently got like that's the newest edition and um yeah i just uh enjoy having them as um i guess the

20:10 Rob Maile the palette of sounds that I can somewhat coherently use because like all the other like guitar and other instruments I you know I can kind of fake my way through but it's it's horrendous like I would never never inflict that upon an artist like the only thing I'd subject them to is my keyboard playing

20:32 Luke F. Walton that's great and it's so fun to hear yeah the story of gear and also i think having different palettes from different decades or at least from the headspace of different decades is a really cool thing too especially for yeah producer where you're like okay i know what you're going for let me reach into this preset we'll dial it in a little bit maybe we saturate the preamps a little and it's like boom i've put in 1985 all

20:56 Rob Maile Yeah, yeah, definitely.

20:57 Luke F. Walton of these little little tools in the toolkit yeah it's really nice so let's see what else you have you also have a nice rack a rack of uh looks like some compression and maybe some digital effects back there too i'm not 100 sure cool

21:12 Rob Maile Nothing digital. There's top the things that you can actually see back there. Those are some tape machine preamps. They are vacuum tube preamps very much in the same vein as Ampex. They're actually the company was called Berlant Concertone. They eventually became TEAC. Yeah.

21:30 Rob Maile Originally, they were an American company like these were made here in Los Angeles, they must have been from a stereo tape machine because they are sequentially like the serial numbers are the same and

21:41 Luke F. Walton Sweet.

21:42 Rob Maile one of them says like, you know, one, the other one says two and I bought when I picked them up to restore them they were together.

21:49 Rob Maile So I also, you know, like I said, like I do a lot of like the technical side helps me with the sound and the creative side because you know the the sad reality especially for a lot of bedroom people you know working in their their their house or their bedroom you know these studios like home studio people the prices and the

22:09 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

22:10 Rob Maile barriers to entry for for making decent sounds are worse than i think they've they've ever been particularly like in the keyboard space um

22:19 Luke F. Walton yeah,

22:19 Rob Maile so

22:20 Luke F. Walton yeah

22:20 Rob Maile if you put the extra work in to get more technically inclined you can save yourself a lot of money if you are a person who who likes to record music so like those you know i did myself i restored them and um they work great like i'm using one of them right now like you probably can't see but there's a meter that's dancing up top um

22:42 Luke F. Walton Cool

22:42 Rob Maile so that's what you're hearing and you're also hearing an 1176 clone compressor in that rack made by a company i think they're no longer in business gramtech uh i hadn't heard of them at all before

22:55 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

22:55 Rob Maile i got it but it's a very solid well-made clone of an 1176 which is also on this vocal chain that you're hearing and uh last but not least like i said i am you know kind of starting out and building this space so this rack is is you know there will be more in the future but right underneath that there is my My biggest project so far, a Poltec EQP-1A. The venerable EQ that I actually, I built it from scratch.

23:26 Luke F. Walton Cool, sweet.

23:27 Rob Maile So there are a lot of companies out there where you can buy various kits, and I sort of did that. Some of the components were from like the chassis, the hardware are from like a company, but. But a lot of the components, what you can do, and what I'd highly recommend is

23:45 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

23:45 Rob Maile source

23:46 Luke F. Walton yes

23:46 Rob Maile some of your parts, your transformers. There are vintage, new old stock components out there. So it's kind of a hodgepodge mixture of vintage and modern reproductions also being used now on my vocal, and you're here listening to it. So yeah, I use those two, the 1176 and the... the Poltec they get used a ton like on a lot a lot of stuff Oh and yes

24:13 Luke F. Walton yeah.

24:13 Rob Maile they are pretty much my only like very professional like equipment that I have but I you know still like with the slew of plugins that are sitting on this computer over there like I find myself given the choice between the two always driven to just go over there and like I said commune with

24:35 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

24:35 Rob Maile them and interact like the Poltec especially it's such a musical it's almost an instrument on

24:41 Luke F. Walton Totally.

24:41 Rob Maile its own

24:42 Luke F. Walton Totally is. And it's like the limiting factors of it are also unlimited because you can attenuate and boost in weird ways. And that's one of the fun things about that, Poltec in particular, is like normally you think in EQ like a car EQ or a parametric EQ where it's like I turn down this band and with the Poltec you can do some bizarro stuff and get some really cool interactions between the different components.

25:06 Rob Maile Yeah, and I think my... My philosophy and like my approach. the thing that draws me towards equipment any piece of gear or synthesizer is like how is it how do i interact with it like

25:24 Luke F. Walton Oh,

25:24 Rob Maile how does

25:25 Luke F. Walton okay.

25:25 Rob Maile the the person interact with it it's like something like you know a graphic eq or something it's

25:32 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

25:32 Rob Maile great and it functionally works but there's an aspect of interaction you know the person interacting with it but also the oh the controls interacting with each other like what another thing that springs to mind a lot of guitar players if they find a tube amp they like you know old fender amps like the the eq you know and like different controls on a gain master volume they they interact with each other so it's

25:56 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

25:56 Rob Maile not uniform so if you turn one control up and then another one up you know you're not getting the same as if you just turned one up if that

26:06 Luke F. Walton Right.

26:06 Rob Maile makes sense

26:07 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

26:07 Rob Maile you

26:07 Luke F. Walton exactly. Exactly. These things are like. oddly intertwined and that's

26:10 Rob Maile Yeah.

26:11 Luke F. Walton part of the fun of the yeah the actual analog world and also the way that you're uh setting up your signal chain and just by nature of your limited resources you're creating a house sound which throughout all of musical history has been very much a thing and i think that

26:28 Luke F. Walton some just kind of have so many spoils slash also a lot of plugins that it can make it more muddied as to like oh who produced this or like it's like less of a sonic fingerprint even across genre if you're like using the same gear across a bunch of tunes that's going to sound like you in this space with this whole rig in the order with the components that you decided to do vintage new stock versus you know uh the the stuff that came with with the kit and i think all those little micro

26:57 Rob Maile Micro decisions, going back to the decision point, add up to, you know, make your music your music.

27:03 Luke F. Walton All right, interrupt this very important broadcast. Right, what I'm asking for is for you to rate it five stars, share it with your friends. This is like the most important thing for this podcast to grow. So if you want to do this, you go into the podcast screen, right? You click on the dot, dot, dot on Spotify. Under there, it says rate show and you go and you click it five stars.

27:21 Luke F. Walton If you could do that for me, that's the best way for the algorithms and all this stuff.

27:24 Luke F. Walton stuff to share it out with the world i know that it's a lot to ask but if you could please please please just please just hit those three dots and a five star it would really help us out and helps us you know get the get the word out and spread the love of music so thank you if you're listening on youtube you know what to do like subscribe all that good stuff thank you so much and here's the rest of the episode yeah

27:42 Rob Maile Absolutely, yeah, it's a great point. yeah it's fun too about uh physical gear going back to guitar pedals is i love

27:50 Rob Maile chaining things together in unexpected ways or putting something that should be in front or behind of something and flipping them just to see what happens just like uh i think ribbon microphones are really interesting in terms of like impedance and the preamps that you choose with the ribbon microphone just can give like some crazy different sounds you probably know more than i do in terms of the technical reasons why that might be but very it's a very interesting game of what plugs into what and where

28:18 Rob Maile Where? Yeah, it's one of the things I just feel very fortunate and I lament that like more music people aren't and producers and engineers like people who record music, you know, aren't given that crash course into things like that like

28:35 Rob Maile Cool. source impedance and load impedance because it's hard to get a grasp of using modern understanding and modern education of electronics. uh

28:45 Rob Maile Okay, interesting. yeah because it really is like a vintage a lot of our pedagogy in music is like rooted in

28:54 Rob Maile things 50 years ago that they won't teach you in a modern electrical engineering class but are so important stuff like like you said like you know these really sensitive audio devices like a ribbon microphone um that yeah like it it needs a certain to see a certain impedance from a preamp and solid state preamps needing being very sensitive about the impedance of a microphone

29:19 Rob Maile For the listeners and sort of somewhat to me. Me? What does that mean? impedance okay so um impedance is basically the resistance of something towards an alternating current or ac electrical signal resistance is basically what we use for dc but in audio we're talking a waveform alternating current and the impedance

29:48 Rob Maile of for instance a speaker it typically has to match with whatever you're plugging it into in like a guitar amplifier it's

29:57 Rob Maile plugged into the amp you know the secondary of the output transformer on like a tube guitar amp it has different taps to plug into different things so you have an 8 ohm tap that's for your 8 ohm speaker you have a 16 ohm tap that's for your 16 ohm speaker and then it can get a bit more confusing but it really isn't it's simple for for microphones solid state preamps and amplifiers in general are pretty sensitive

30:23 Rob Maile If, in my experience at least, they need to have a microphone source that's within a certain range. It has to be the impedance value 10 times, at least 10 times less. You know, it's not exact.

30:38 Rob Maile Okay. It can be within a certain range, but that's how you get basically a relatively flat frequency response where the audio signal is behaving as intended.

30:49 Rob Maile Okay. Yeah. With... Tube gear? you want things matched generally so your 150 ohm microphone like you know the sm7bs that we're talking into now you plug that into the 150 ohm input of your tube mic preamp and you're set a lot of times they would be 50 like 50 there were man i i wish i had jj blair here to explain the microphone standards but

31:20 Rob Maile Yeah, as far as i I recall there was Western Electric and RCA, they came up with two standards and I think RCA, no, Western Electric was the one that, that one,

31:30 Rob Maile no, Western Electric was the one that that one, but basically there were like 50 ohm and 500 ohm and 150 ohm, like basically all this stuff. And the lower end of the spectrum, the important thing to note is like those lower 50 and 30 ohm, those were designed for ribbon mic.

31:47 Rob Maile given microphones because if you if you had the the lowest level of anything impeding that signal you know it would be as sensitive as possible and you'd get as much output into your preamp gain and noise signal to noise ratio things like that were all you know much more limiting factors back then today generally for a ribbon microphone what you need is just a modern preamp like as long as it's designed for a microphone and it has a certain amount of

32:21 Rob Maile amount of gain like you need a lot of gain sm7 or something sensitive like a ribbon microphone if you have that generally you're you're in good shape like there's a lot of mythology that goes around like oh don't do this don't do that like you won't get the right sound you'll you'll lose high end you know but yeah generally it's pretty simple you know focus on your gain first and foremost and you know you don't want a noisy preamp because you're going to be pushing it pretty hard

32:46 Rob Maile Okay. Yeah. And that's a really good point too. And I feel like a lot of people don't, you know, they just think.

32:49 Rob Maile think microphone plug into a thing and it records but the idea of noise is ever present and there's like no such thing as a noiseless signal it's just how are you controlling it and how are you setting up your gain staging and everything like that to to minimize it and i think that's part of the reason why like modern recordings can sound so much cleaner along with digital technology the strip noise but versus like old old old like you know 1920s the library of congress

33:18 Rob Maile archive kind of recordings and it's just it's like listening through snow but it's a it's a vibe though i've

33:25 Rob Maile it got it a bunch can of plug-ins be to add the snow add the snow back so sweet yeah no that that reminds me i have a an old wire recorder which was the the predecessor to tape that it was my grandparents and it's a tube amplifier and records onto this what looks like fishing line but it's made of steel and yeah it still actually works like i've had tape recorders

33:49 Rob Maile I have horrible luck with like old tape recorders they never work there's always some problem but this thing like still works and I have for one song on that record um

33:58 Rob Maile Yeah. for Saint Nick the Lesser we did do some reamping of vocals and some instruments through it and yeah it was just like an instant like it made stuff sound like FDR addressing the nation after Pearl Harbor like it was it's and yeah it's amazing that that thing still works it's a kick-ass Ask guitar amp like

34:17 Rob Maile cool yes I love it that's awesome no I love those kind of super mechanical things like I had the pleasure of recording into like

34:28 Rob Maile a spring reverb but it was just a one single spring so you could like jostle it and make those like spring effects that you can do with like knocking or kicking a guitar amp and it's just it's so fun to i don't know i i think i spent too much of my time on my computer kidding i get out of that world um yeah it's it's fun too to think about tape and tape effects what what did you go into when you were making your record um were you you

34:54 Rob Maile thinking about like a sonic kind of character was it emerging as you went like as somebody you know you're making your first full record last year and so this is like very fresh but it's also a very interesting time to be making your first record and have it come out sounding the way that it did like it's it's raw and it's aggressive and it's interesting it's got character yeah what were the decisions that were made during versus

35:19 Rob Maile Before. Yeah, well, it's important to note that that record was a years-long endeavor for this artist. So he started it probably in 21, 2021 or

35:32 Rob Maile Oh, 2022. wow. Yeah. And it really took a long time creatively, and I had the pleasure of co-producing with

35:39 Rob Maile Okay. a gentleman named Ryan Jarvis. A lot of us just call him Jarvis, and his artist name is... is Mr. Jarvis, because he's actually a music educator. He's a teacher. You know, Jarvis had a lot of experience where I felt like I was coming into it like, like I said, I was fresh out of school. I was barely even sure that like is this something i want to do do

36:03 Rob Maile Yeah, i want to make music you know behind the scenes and he kind of like was the role model and he set the the tone of like here's how you deal with difficulty here's how you deal with resistance from the artist and from you know how to explain our because i'm not used to having to explain my creative choices it's just like oh you like you like this

36:26 Rob Maile Yeah. they're like oh that sounds great and we move on but it was like you know with this artist we really had to explain like okay what is it we're doing why do we think it's a good idea and yeah that that taught me to as a listener and as a creative like quantify and codify why does something sound good

36:46 Rob Maile which is a good skill to have because I, you know, I don't only use it for myself, but I can use it listening to music and trying to emulate and learn because, you know, I'm still learning so much. I feel like a really little fish. But yeah, the decisions beforehand, a lot of them were what should the overall vibe and the sound of this and the message of this record be, you know.

37:14 Rob Maile The artist is very passionate about mental health-related issues, and he comes from a background of punk rock and DIY music and singer-songwriter, songsmith culture. He's very serious about his lyrics and

37:33 Rob Maile Yeah the stories. He's telling a lot of stories where you can tell, like, this is not him that he's singing about. He's singing about a character.

37:42 Rob Maile so we yeah we had to translate that into how we're going to record it so what we ultimately went with was i guess an overdub based process where we started like the very first thing we recorded was the singer and playing guitar we did a demo with an sm7 a real like his vocals and some some nicer mics and we started with that and then we kind of built arrangements with a full band you know drummer bass player

38:10 Rob Maile where Jarvis played a lot. He played drums on one or two tracks. He played guitars on pretty much all the tracks. And he played bass on, I think, every track.

38:22 Rob Maile Cool. And that kind of just left me to clean up the keyboards and stuff and kind of do, I got to do a lot of the supervising, I guess,

38:33 Rob Maile Yeah. like, you know, I would be the one in the booth while he's like, stay right there.

38:37 Rob Maile or like hit record when when i tell you and he would run out and grab like which guitar do i want and he had like a wall of weird interesting guitars and you know which amp and he'd put you know and you're like okay go and then i would hit record and you know i'd be like why don't you try this and i would you know so that was probably my favorite most exhilarating like

38:58 Rob Maile vignette memory of of that point in time which was really like years long process

39:04 Rob Maile Wow. Yeah. um but yeah it was also very ambitious so like the decisions during um the artist

39:14 Rob Maile wanted to add some interesting things so um for instance like we did um because it is um pretty folky um

39:24 Rob Maile Mm we-hmm. used a boundary microphone on the floor and did some stomp claps i brought in this old like chord it's like a reed organ like those little things that are in like a suitcase they're

39:38 Rob Maile Yeah. you know they were sold Yeah. for decades and decades and so many people have them lying around in their garage i had one and we used that on a song and then he wanted to add strings and horns um

39:50 Rob Maile Cool. so we found string players we found horn players and then it was like uh-oh who you know we don't know how to read music like thank rob you know he's the guy who knows how to write these parts so i got to remind myself how to write in tenor clef which

40:07 Rob Maile Yes. was very fun and Transposition's great, it was isn't it? tremendous like that experience getting to work with the string players live and

40:16 Rob Maile Yeah, totally. that's a really fun thing that it's a really rewarding experience that reminded me of my music theory past of seeing music on paper hearing it in your MIDI like in your DAW like these MIDI versions of these these real musicians and you know seeing this picture of the Grand Canyon and

40:37 Rob Maile Right. then getting to stand in front of it and like hearing the real musicians and communicating with them like you know yeah and directing them and they were all great to work with very professional and yeah like the decisions towards the end were mostly creative like we were adding stuff in as a

40:59 Rob Maile as a synth person like i got to do some fun interesting stuff like he did a song called train tracks about it uses this train metaphor throughout the song so i was like oh boy and i found this synthesizer and i patched it for a while and got like a train you know just like a you know chug chug chug

41:16 Rob Maile Yes. sound out of the synthesizer and Cool. we you know Yes. i think we put it through a reverb or something to make it sound more you know kind of bellowing and distant and yeah so we made our train sound and then there was this other song where this this woman is sitting on a bench in a rainstorm so

41:35 Rob Maile Yeah. we created the sounds of the rainstorm with you know synthesizers and other things we had laying around there was another speaking of things that just happen and we're like we go with it that we're not planned what's it called god bless it's this

41:50 Rob Maile kind of it was written a long time ago well i guess long time ago now it's about the mass surveillance that happened after 9-11 it's kind of this hard punk folk song very up-tempo and jarvis was playing tambourine and he was hitting

42:07 Rob Maile heck out of this tambourine for an entire three-minute song and like right at the end like the last hit of the song the tambourine that he was using shatters just into like 8 000 pieces and you're like like it's it's all and i think he had a stereo you know mic pattern so they're flying around the room you can hear uh and we kept it we're like this is amazing like we can't recreate

42:34 Rob Maile create this exploding tambourine so yeah i you know there's a lot of moments definitely i'm sure i'm leaving a bunch of them out yeah

42:44 Rob Maile no it's it's really special to see i don't know the whole recording process especially something that takes that much time that you're investing into and then all the happy little accidents like that are just special it's really special um so this show is called love music more and i like to get ask my guests

43:02 Luke F. Walton The same question at the end of the show. Segment's called Love Music Why? And Rob, why do you love music?

43:13 Rob Maile Music is to me something that I feel and I consider to be innate. It's part of the human experience, like all art, honestly. We live in interesting times. A friend of mine told me about this Chinese proverb.

43:36 Rob Maile It's like a blessing. It's, you know, may you live in interesting times like that's we are definitely living in interesting times. And

43:47 Rob Maile There's a lot of uncertainty in the world, in the state of nations, in our society, in our industry, in music. Like, you know, we have this advent of computers, of particularly computers that are becoming more and more real and creating things that artists create and that people create in a time when people...

44:12 Rob Maile I feel our feeling uncertainty, feeling division, there are things we come back to like, and music has always been one of those during the pandemic like 2020 people were flocking to their favorite shows they were they were watching films, TV, music, art is what gets us like makes us want to Get up in the morning, like continue in the face of incredible division, uncertainty.

44:43 Rob Maile You know, it's great having industry infrastructure, all of that. But like what makes us continue, I believe, to keep existing is things that tell our stories and that bring us together. Music. I feel is a great unifier and an antidote to division.

45:04 Rob Maile It's also a way to speak up and speak out in the face of, you know, injustice or adversity.

45:15 Rob Maile Yeah, you know, why I love music is it's the only thing that like I've ever wanted to do, you know, going through life I've been unsure about a lot of things. But the one thing I've never been unsure about is that I love this and I want to do this.

45:33 Rob Maile And, you know, I wish that to everyone i wish like that you can have that experience whatever it is you do um and yeah i i hope that people especially through stuff like this and thank you for having me on like get some insight into the human quality and how many people how many emotions and how much work that human beings put into your favorite song Or your favorite album.

46:02 Rob Maile So yeah, I hope that answers your question. No, it's a great answer. It's a great answer. And it's a great point too, because like, think about somebody made this cable and this microphone and this preamp, this computer, this musical gear behind me, I'm putting, you know, the energy into it, you're putting the energy into it, we're collaborating, we're talking about it.

46:22 Rob Maile Yeah, it's just the cumulative amount of insight and wisdom, the people that invented the microphone. You know, all these innovations, all the shoulders of giants that we stand upon, that is the community and that is the beauty of it is we're all telling the same story.

46:37 Rob Maile Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, I'll let you get back to communing with your synthesizers. I love that you called it that because it's such a good way to do it. It makes it feel religious, which it is.

46:47 Rob Maile It sure is. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

46:49 Luke F. Walton thank you, Rob. I really appreciate you coming on. Where can people get in touch, book you, listen to stuff you worked on?

46:54 Rob Maile Where's the best way for people to connect?

46:56 Rob Maile Um, yeah, follow me on Instagram. It's just my name, no space Rob Maile with an E. So yeah, just check it out.

47:06 Rob Maile Awesome. Well, let's keep in touch. I'm down in San Diego, but I make it up to LA often. So we'd love to grab a coffee or something.

47:12 Rob Maile Right on. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. Awesome, bro. Thanks. All right. Take care.