An Interview with Stephan Hawkes

0:35 Luke F. Walton Good everybody, welcome back to Love Music More. I am Scoobert Doobert, and I'm about to be joined with Stephan Hawkes, producer, mix engineer, and mastering engineer. One of the things I love about that is he thinks about music end to end.

0:48 Luke F. Walton Blank page to finish song, and every step of that process obviously is like a job unto itself, but talking to somebody that does the entire thing, it's just such a unique perspective, and I'm so excited to share that conversation with you because it made me love music more. More? Hopefully it'll do the same on your end. Before we do, I'd love to introduce our title sponsor, DistroKid.

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1:32 Luke F. Walton A million plus artists rely on distro kid to get their music onto Spotify, Apple music, YouTube, TikTok, title, Instagram, and all the major streaming services. Now's your chance. Go to distro kid.com slash VIP slash love music more. All one word for 30% off. Enjoy the conversation. What's good, everybody? This is Scoobert Doobert. Welcome back to Love Music More.

1:54 Luke F. Walton I am joined with Stephan Hawkes. Welcome to the podcast.

1:58 Stephan Hawkes Well, thanks for having me.

2:00 Luke F. Walton It's my pleasure. I'm so excited, Stephan, to talk about your work as a producer, mix engineer, mastering engineer, and kind of your perspective on workflows. And the number one thing, the thing I wanted to kick off the conversation is the guitar. The kind of the ways that you treat guitars and then I want to...

2:20 Luke F. Walton I want to learn about kind of your vision from beginning to end because I was watching one of your videos on mastering too about like simultaneously extending width and depth and punch in the middle.

2:32 Luke F. Walton How do you set yourself up for success on the production end on kind of like the earlier parts and does your awareness of mastering kind of ever seep into the way that you are producing, arranging, or thinking about guitar tones?

2:45 Stephan Hawkes Yeah, I mean, they're definitely all related. Like, it's kind of crazy to me that some people, I mean. It's great that we have specialists and that's kind of the way this job used to be, but the fact that at all stages of the production that I kind of know how everything's going to translate and what is best to prioritize, I feel like it makes a big difference.

3:03 Stephan Hawkes You have to make a lot of choices when making a record. And so a lot of times they seem sort of arbitrary. They become a lot less arbitrary if you know what the following steps are. So if you're deciding between two guitar tones, they're both great, but one's going to be easier to mix later.

3:20 Stephan Hawkes If you're just an engineer, you might go for the one that's cooler or has like more harmonic top end because in the room it's cooler. But if you're the guy mixing it or the guy mixing and mastering it, you kind of know which one's going to play nice against the rest of the music or which one is more genre appropriate.

3:36 Stephan Hawkes And so those can kind of be the tiebreakers when you're having to decide between lots of great tones. You know, you have to pick eventually, you got to whittle it all down to something. So.

3:45 Luke F. Walton That's a great answer. And I also think that that's one of the things that differentiate. differentiate somebody that's got a lot of experience versus somebody that doesn't have a ton of experience is zooming in versus zooming out.

3:56 Stephan Hawkes Yeah. yeah i say that stuff all the time it's like that's i mean it's not just with music it's kind of with everything it's like you think about the decisions you make and it's like well you can make them as a person who's like tunnel vision deep in the moment i don't know if that's usually the way i mean sometimes you got to be locked in i guess but like just you know take a second be objective think outside of yourself or or whatever just kind of think about like the big picture you know in most decisions i feel like

4:24 Stephan Hawkes feel like you know audio production is no different you know sometimes there'll be something cool about a way i'm doing a master and i'll be kind of enamored with something and if i just let myself go crazy i might take something too far too stylistic of a direction that isn't necessary because i get enamored with it but of course i constantly am checking myself going like all right well you stumbled upon something cool here now is it really appropriate or correct and usually you know you end up reining yourself in unless you've got carplonge

4:51 Stephan Hawkes wants to just go wild which is more kind of mixing you get a little more uh leeway there but yeah definitely zooming out and understanding the whole process i think matters a lot it's not necessarily always seen in a positive light if you're a mastering engineer to do other jobs a lot of times you know people make the jump to being a mastering engineer and i do totally get that from like a convenience workflow uh and monetarily you know uh if i had just spent all the money i was spending on recording gear

5:19 Stephan Hawkes on mastering gear sooner i probably would have gotten to the rig that i have sooner so i can understand that but to me i think the benefits outweigh the negatives because when i hear a production

5:33 Stephan Hawkes I feel like I can see inside of the people's hopes and dreams and missed opportunities, and usually clients' feedback reflects that. They're like, oh man, we were so worried the kick drum wasn't this enough.

5:46 Stephan Hawkes And you're like, yeah, I took care of that because I've had mixes where I couldn't quite get the kick drum to be as good as the snare drum, and I didn't want you to meet that same end. So yeah, there is kind of a sympathetic. With that equality, you end up having when you're deeply involved in the other aspects of the production that definitely helps as a mastering engineer in my experience.

6:07 Luke F. Walton I like that. And I like the finishing each other's sentences kind of stuff is like the purest sign of a good, you know, producer slash mix engineer artist fit is when it's like, I hear what you're going for. You didn't quite get there, but like, let's get there. Let's let's take it all the way.

6:22 Stephan Hawkes Yeah. And you can hear, you know, every genre has different prerequisites. and different goals and different aims and different kind of edges so whatever the edges might be on a folk album are very very much more tame and different than what might be on a technical death metal record and so on and so forth so there is no just like

6:43 Stephan Hawkes people go well master you're just trying to make it sound good and you're like that doesn't mean anything like what sounds good to the average folk listener or people who listen to this genre and so it's one thing if you're a mastering engineer and you're familiar with a lot of the genres but if you actually produce and mix all of these genres inside and out it means kind of no matter what you get sent mastering wise you're like okay well i know what the very best edm records sound like and i know what you know any any kind of genre it's like if you've you

7:11 Stephan Hawkes if you've mixed it and you've done the nuts and bolts of it you're a lot better able to kind of realize like oh this is where they fell flat this is what they're looking for I've I've done this myself you know I bail myself out in mastering when I mix and master my own things so I get it I've I just can't get it in the mix you're like well luckily I have all these big expensive knobs to help myself out too not that I do that as much as maybe I do with other people's stuff because I have the foresight of being able to hear everything

7:37 Stephan Hawkes thing through the gear but i still lean on it a lot because why make a decision that's going to ruin the mix if the if it can be better done in the master and there are lots of situations like that yeah

7:47 Luke F. Walton That's great. I'd love to dig into that more too. I think that's a really fascinating kind of way about thinking of process. And for those that maybe don't master just the mix engineers, I feel like that'd be really interesting to elucidate. Before we get into that, I wanted to talk about your kind of gear journey. So you're talking about, you know, how if I just would have just...

8:05 Luke F. Walton stuck with mastering i would have had all of this this rig how did you progress how did you find like okay i've hit this problem i need a new tool to solve that problem like what what was that looking like yeah

8:15 Stephan Hawkes i mean we don't have the time uh i mean we really i mean like we don't have the time i could probably i could probably fill you know the whole podcast with a story of like two guitar calves um you know but you know out of the 20 or so um but

8:31 Stephan Hawkes basically that's just what i spent my whole life doing so i started out with modest gear really a buddy had some gear that and a pro tool system you know he got for christmas or something i didn't even own it was you know this is like 2001 so it's like he's got a max g4 500 megahertz and a dgo1 24 tracks and pro tools 5.2 like literally i thought like i can't believe we're living in the future you

8:57 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

8:57 Stephan Hawkes know like it

8:58 Luke F. Walton right.

8:58 Stephan Hawkes was a big As a guy working on a little on ADATs and then on four tracks, you know, cassettes mostly, this was just like, I mean, I didn't go to school for a week once I realized this guy had this, I just literally didn't go to school. Like I was just working on like a song. Once I discovered Pro Tools, it's my senior year of high school and I was just like, well, high school's winding down. This is the future.

9:18 Stephan Hawkes You're like, who's going to miss me in a week of high school? And nobody did because, you know, I was basically halfway out the door anyway. But but then.

9:24 Stephan Hawkes you know like you said do a project and you run up against an issue for me i'm super methodical in terms of process and not making the same mistake twice because you know it's anything can come up you make a mistake it's like it's not a big deal you made a mistake everybody does that but if you don't learn from it you make it again that one that one hurts so basically it's just been like a 24-year journey of every time i make a record i get done with the record and then i remix it and then get done with it

9:52 Stephan Hawkes that and i take stock of all the things that were difficult and what tools i you know would have had or what is and is not working and i have some stuff that i've been using since 2002 2003 because it still works but most of the gear is not the stuff that i had back then there's only a handful of killer pieces from from the early days that have stood the test of time and so yeah you really just have to just

10:19 Stephan Hawkes anything that causes you strife anything that gets in your way of making a record you don't need the gear that somebody else needs you don't need that gear everybody makes the mistake of trying to buy the cool channel strip or the cool thing that they see and i have a lot of that stuff but i also have had a lot of that stuff and not gotten along with it that great and really they you know it's like is it the is it the craftsman or the tools it's like it's clearly both

10:45 Stephan Hawkes both we don't all need the same tools but you just have to be honest with yourself about how well your tools are working and so you know if you make an album and every time you make you make three albums and your guitars are kind of brittle and bright well you might need a different guitar kit

11:01 Stephan Hawkes whatever you're using might not be good if you're using the same thing or maybe you're using the band's caps and you don't even own one and you realize that you're basically just some guys bringing in a crate blue voodoo or a Marshall MG412 or something and you're like oh I'm at the whim of whatever these people are and usually when you start out these people are about as poor as you are and so they don't have anything good and then you go okay so it kind of goes full circle you start out getting gear

11:28 Stephan Hawkes to protect yourself from potential downsides and deficiencies and then eventually you have all of the gear you want and you know that the gear isn't stopping you from doing what you're supposed to do eventually you get so confident that it's almost more exciting to record that guy's cab

11:49 Stephan Hawkes Because you've heard all of your calves and you know that even if someone brings in, unless it's complete trash, if it's just a different version of something you have, you know that you can engineer it to sound cool and it will be more accurate to them. So it's like you start out with nothing recording whatever people bring in and then you get the studio drum set, the studio

12:09 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

12:09 Stephan Hawkes guitars,

12:09 Luke F. Walton uh

12:10 Stephan Hawkes the

12:10 Luke F. Walton -huh.

12:10 Stephan Hawkes studio amps and you lean on those while you're learning to get good and eventually get so good that like.

12:15 Stephan Hawkes Like you don't even care what speakers in the cab if it sounds cool at all you will make it sound cool and then it'll be more authentic to the person if authenticity to the person is the goal in that situation so it's kind of comes full circle i'm definitely way past that last part of it i i'm always looking for an excuse to like record other people's stuff i'm not trying to people be like well i don't even need to bring my guitar i go you have to bring your guitar like bring your stuff we'll start with that we'll replace what we need but just don't come in here and assume that you're going to be as comfortable on my

12:48 Stephan Hawkes My you know gear just because it's real nice. It's like, you know, you're making your record use your stuff

12:54 Luke F. Walton yeah and that makes a lot of sense too for particularly like a band that's out playing live they have a certain sound they're naturally blending with each other and writing parts in a certain way that is yeah tied to that amp or tied to that guitar and it's like let's start there let's see if that's working if it's not we'll plug the holes cool

13:11 Stephan Hawkes Yeah, and then especially then you'll know what you have that will fill the gaps So it's like if you never hear what they've got how are you going to know what thing of yours is the better version so

13:22 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

13:22 Stephan Hawkes it's like if you never hear their sound i got 20 guitar cabs you know i got like 20 vintage guitar cabs mostly vintage ones a couple newer ones but you know 20 perfectly matched killer guitar cabs that i love so well and i even if i don't use some of them that often i could never think to sell them and same thing with guitars so it's like it would be how do i narrow it down if i never heard your thing it's like oh

13:45 Stephan Hawkes Now that I've heard your sound, it's a little janky, you know, it's a little too crummy, but I've got an expensive version of that. And so it makes that process a lot easier because you'd have to sit there without ever hearing their cab with their head. You'd have to sit there and play through a lot more cabs to just get an idea to get in the ballpark of when they're going to be comfortable. So it definitely helps.

14:05 Luke F. Walton That's really good wisdom. And I think, yeah, setting that baseline, understanding the problems and then assessing the solutions is a good. Good, very wise work workflow.

14:15 Stephan Hawkes I always tell people like when people are going to come to make a record, I mean like listen I know you probably have a lot of anxiety like we're doing this big thing it's going to be this big endeavor I was like you'll remember it fondly but like it's not going to be like you remember climbing Mount Everest or something it's going to more like you remember like going to watch a sporting event with your buddies recordings can get difficult but they shouldn't be difficult on my account even if you don't bring everything to the table the goal of the engineer producer

14:26 Stephan Hawkes it's not going to be like you remember climbing mount everest or something it's going to more like you remember like going to watch a sporting event with your buddies recordings can get difficult but they shouldn't be difficult on my account even if you don't bring everything to the table the goal of the engineer producer mixer master everybody is just to do everything so effortlessly that no one even knows it's getting done i haven't had a job other than this since 2005 and even then it was really just like i had like a part-time morning job and i was still working

14:52 Stephan Hawkes still recording stuff so you know i've been doing this job since you know basically 2001 2002 if i wasn't able to smoothly do all of these things like it would reflect poorly on me you know it's like that's the whole point is like i people go like oh man you're just so good at the stuff and you do it so easy it's like imagine if you spent 60 to 80 hours a week doing something for 20 something years

15:19 Stephan Hawkes and they go oh yeah i guess you should be pretty i'm like yeah i guess i should be pretty good at it right like you know if i wasn't wouldn't that be the sadder outcome and then they kind of go okay we're in good hands here like this guy doesn't even he doesn't even just the engineers like he breathes he's doing all the calculations and he's i'm watching a guy play guitar i'm listening to his riffs i'm listening to how comfortable he is i'm crunching numbers i'm moving things around you're just massaging the whole process to where

15:45 Stephan Hawkes where lots of monumental things are occurring and you aren't sweating it and they have zero idea it's even going on they just know they're having a lot of fun and sounding their best so

15:57 Luke F. Walton that intuitive level of understanding is is so important and also so difficult to transmit because i know a lot of people will hit like forums like gear space it used to be gear

16:08 Stephan Hawkes space yes for gear i'm absolutely a gear space dude i just go nuts

16:14 Luke F. Walton and they will go on there and they'll

16:16 Stephan Hawkes be like

16:16 Luke F. Walton gurus teach me and they're always dissatisfied they're always disappointed because they what they hit up against is the guru that says If you have to ask you don't know you know it's like very like mountain sage

16:29 Stephan Hawkes yeah and it's and there are like that's the thing about a lot of this stuff you know there's somewhat like i can tell you the what I can tell you the way I mic up a cab and it is useful information. The problem is, is like there's useful information and then there's explaining to people the context of the useful information, tempering their expectations of the results versus your own.

16:52 Stephan Hawkes Because even when I go to mix a record or even when I'm doing stuff, I don't always know what I'm going to do. You know, it's like I figure it out on the fly. How can I tell you how to solve every problem?

17:02 Stephan Hawkes problem if i solve every problem in the moment and it comes from a game plan of you know there's just hundreds of game plans and you just build experience points and you build experience points i mean i'll literally be working on something and i'll be having a hard time i was having a hard time nailing a bass tone on a record that had a lot of different di's and a lot of different genres it was going between like funk and rock

17:25 Luke F. Walton Hmm.

17:25 Stephan Hawkes and the di's seemed like they were done with a lot of different bases and a lot of different levels and so

17:30 Stephan Hawkes I had consistent drums and pretty consistent guitars and vocals but like the bass was kind of all over the place and I was having a little trouble with it and I was letting it sit because I wasn't you know I was like I got to come up with this and I just rolling around in my brain that's been doing this for way too long and I just thought of something that I hadn't done in you know 10 years

17:50 Stephan Hawkes a plugin i wasn't even sure i had or i was like is it on subscription now i think i used to own it i mean i don't even know if i have this thing in the list you know it's it's 2022 and and i just had this idea i was like oh you know i think this might solve all my problems and it absolutely did and so that's the thing it's like you can tell someone just fix it but it's like the only reason i know how to fix stuff is because i fixed it so many times before which is why i pretty much just

18:19 Stephan Hawkes just you know like i said even during high school i just launched right into doing this i was making four-track recordings when i was 13 years old recording my band i just it was just like learn by doing but you can get good information from people as like a foundational starting point i mean i see clips online of people just saying real obvious stuff and you go Oh,

18:39 Stephan Hawkes that is a nice simplistic way to think about something that I do already. And so I think the online guru thing, people who have interned with me or.

18:51 Stephan Hawkes I'll be like listen part of it's just that this stuff's expensive and it rules and without it you're gonna have a hard time doing it however you take that out of the out of the equation

18:59 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

18:59 Stephan Hawkes these are the parts that are actually useful for anyone to know when miking up a guitar cab or literally guys that were here I was tracking this week doing a bunch of crazy shoegaze guitar wall of sound awesome awesome guitar tones

19:14 Luke F. Walton Cool.

19:14 Stephan Hawkes menagerie of wicked vibe and space and it's just so cool like 90s hum style big guitar stuff and they were asking me and i'm like all right well i don't know what cab this guy's got but i was like these are the mics i use i you know you probably don't have one of these but you've got one of these you got you know you got the dust cap you got the rest of the speaker it's going to get darker if you move a bit over it's going to get brightest in the center if you only got one sm57 just move it from the center over until it sounds good

19:46 Stephan Hawkes that's the best you can be able to do without me knowing more or spending any money and that's true you know but you don't hear people say that necessarily that clearly you know they're just like well you gotta have good cab and you gotta have good breeze and you gotta it's like well yeah but they already they don't so like just

20:03 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

20:03 Stephan Hawkes give them the piece of information they can use and move it along you know

20:06 Luke F. Walton exactly. And but also I feel like there's incentive structures against that kind of like common sensical straightforward knowledge.

20:15 Stephan Hawkes yeah and i don't buy into any of that anything

20:17 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

20:17 Stephan Hawkes anyone wants to know because at the end of the day gatekeeping and all that it's just like i mean it's just not any way to live so you know i spend a lot a large percentage of my life

20:28 Stephan Hawkes in the studio doing this job that i've had forever it's just basically what i do i get up every day i go get a coffee and i come here and for as long as i need to be here and then i go home or go out or whatever so the idea of like of aligning that thing that is such a huge part of your life with being stingy or withholding that isn't gonna serve i'm not saying there's not some get rich quick guys out there that have actually made way more money than i'm ever going to make doing that

20:57 Stephan Hawkes um and good for them but i'm not built for that idea it's just not like a fun way to live like what's a lot more fun is seeing the light bulb moment when you tell someone something that can actually help them you do that a million times that's more fun than being like wouldn't you like to know you

21:16 Luke F. Walton Yes.

21:17 Stephan Hawkes know it's like that's not fun like it's not fun it's not interactive it's not helpful and it's not positive and the ultimate reality is everyone told us that home recording was going to kill studios and I guess you know in some ways I was the young home recording guy and

21:32 Stephan Hawkes and now i am the big studio guy and yeah did a lot of studios go away sure but there's still so much music being made and there's more music being made than ever so if i gatekeep that information that means i'm just going to get worse tracks to mix if no one knows how to do the job then they're going to throw up their hands and just pay you to mix it like they were going to anyway but the tracks are going to be worse the whole generation of people that don't know how to do anything and you're like

22:00 Stephan Hawkes but yeah now they need me it's like they need you anyway if they only needed you because you weren't willing to give them any like fundamental information then like they probably weren't going to need you period because it doesn't matter even if you can mic up a guitar cab to sound good that doesn't mean you can mix the record let alone master a record so and i think helping people is is a lot better way to end up interacting with people you know the idea i can't tell you how many people

22:28 Stephan Hawkes and again it's not why i do it but it's like you help them out with something just because why not takes two seconds of your time and the next thing you know they send you the thing to master they send you the thing to mix great and then you can help when you get the tracks i'll educate people on things that were good and what i had to do and what they can do better next time and then you go well yeah but then they're just going to get so good they're not going to need you it's like maybe but did you ever consider the fact that like you could get really good at weeding but you don't going to want to weed your own yard

22:58 Stephan Hawkes it's like i pay people to do almost anything that isn't audio related and i pay people to do audio related things from time to time on my own records and things where i want that separation so it's like this idea that people are just going to stop paying you because you help them is stupid it's like if you help someone they're going to remember that and they're going to remember well who's the smart guy who gave me this great idea he probably has about a billion other smart things that he can use to help me and uh it's pretty much always the case so

23:26 Luke F. Walton yeah and also helping people that are focused on kind of their own lane doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to interact or they're going to cross over and even if they do that's cool because now you're a mentor to somebody that's coming up you know like Yeah, that's the cool

23:36 Stephan Hawkes and I've done that. I didn't even, you know, it's like I was in some Facebook groups back in the day with like younger guys that are like huge now. Yeah,

23:43 Luke F. Walton yeah yeah

23:44 Stephan Hawkes great.

23:44 Luke F. Walton yeah

23:45 Stephan Hawkes I hope, you know, a guy's more successful than you. I'm like, great. I mean, I don't know what like, I don't know what that has to do with me. Like, I don't know.

23:54 Stephan Hawkes what that has to do with me like they did exactly what they were supposed to do like i'm happy for them i'm why what does that yeah that competitive like when people talk about like the competitive stuff i'm like i literally like sang the least you know

24:10 Luke F. Walton Mm

24:10 Stephan Hawkes on our

24:10 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

24:10 Stephan Hawkes my old portland studio you know with my buddy chris crummett and we we were across the hall from each other helping each other and we were technically each other's competition it's

24:20 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

24:20 Stephan Hawkes it's to us it's a laughable idea guys doing the exact same job across the hall from each other

24:27 Stephan Hawkes trying to make it as easy as possible on one another bailing each other out of jams going halfsies on gear so we could get to the bottom of the gear quest going and buying guitars together and it's not a competition it's you know we're just guys trying to make records it's hard enough it's hard enough to make a record to sit there and go like oh this guy who's younger than me who i used to give advice to now he's making bigger records than me you're just like

24:53 Stephan Hawkes great that's great like good and if they especially if they sound good i mean the only time i ever even get a little uh you know the only time i ever get a little petty about it is if i don't think the records sound good and i'm confused by why anyone likes it that rarely happens i mean it does happen but i'm not like super picky with i can usually understand why people like most things something's got to be pretty objectively bad for me to start going like

25:20 Stephan Hawkes hmm but like it basically never happens like all these guys everybody's killing it if the record sounds good they're killing it you don't know how it got done and it doesn't matter how it got done if it's if the record sounds good you're a professional you did the job doesn't matter what it took to do it doesn't matter how many revisions it doesn't matter how much version one sucked and that you almost got fired none of that matters the record comes out it sounds good and your name's on it and your reputation is intact and

25:47 Stephan Hawkes that's all anyone cares about and nobody has any idea what goes on behind the scenes making records none all they know is they go click on the thing and does it hit or does it not hit and you have to remember that at all times none of this stuff's precious you're just trying to get that listener right there and if you did that

26:04 Stephan Hawkes That frequency in your overheads that you never did quite tame probably isn't going to be the problem, you know.

26:11 Luke F. Walton Yeah, that emotional impact and keeping centered on that main goal, I think, is also a really great bit of wisdom because, yeah, it's so easy with so many inputs and so many different decisions to get lost on the rabbit hole of a single decision or to get lost on the technical and then lose kind of the forest for the trees.

26:30 Stephan Hawkes yeah and like people always like another thing about that that's so funny is people always talk about how like well audio quality doesn't matter who's going to pay somebody to mix their record or master their record when everyone's just listening to it out of a phone and then you realize that a if someone's scrolling that means you have to grab their attention that's being pulled eight billion different directions you have to grab their attention in like two seconds and it has to sound good coming out of the phone

26:58 Stephan Hawkes so to everybody who says that like who cares everyone's just listening to spotify's algorithm out of their phone it's like it matters even more now people big big home systems of the 90s made even bad thin records sound big the loudness button on an old morance it made everything fine and go away and now you have to make like you have to hear it out of a phone when you're scrolling

27:24 Stephan Hawkes And it has to be good, so good immediately that someone stops and goes, damn. so if anything the bar has been raised by this weird you know sort of two second consumption culture this you know 24 hour news cycle culture is like man you have to like grab them and then you got to keep them that record better be cool and making a record sound good you you know when i was younger that was always kind of my goal i thought you know because it was hard to do uh we need to make records sound good and you realize shortly after making a record sound good that like

27:56 Stephan Hawkes That's only going to get you so far. You have to make it sound engaging or cool or whatever that is for that genre. That's much harder to identify that. But eventually that matters more than the fundamentals. You want to get the fundamentals there.

28:10 Stephan Hawkes but if you had to sacrifice some fundamentals for uh grabbing someone in some vibe you'd be an idiot not to and i struggle with that as a guy who you know like i struggle with that sometimes but not i don't struggle with it that much anymore i used to struggle with it more because i'd be like but yeah but this has a better frequency range and the lows go lower and it's more and it's like yes but

28:34 Stephan Hawkes you know you gotta you gotta pick your battles the battle is won in the mid-range

28:38 Luke F. Walton generally Uh

28:38 Stephan Hawkes when

28:38 Luke F. Walton -huh.

28:38 Stephan Hawkes you go listen on fancy mastering speakers that's always the most revealing part is the mid-range that you don't hear because that's where the battle is won it's the it's the audible range where the human voice and the you know the guitar that range is kind of the battle is is one in most records and that's the thing that'll cause something to leap out if mid-range is really dialed that's the thing where people they don't know

29:22 Stephan Hawkes you might want to make sure you got a little of that too but ultimately if you had to pick one or the other it's it's mids all day so it

29:28 Luke F. Walton Yeah, and I also like the idea of the platform-specific nature of like there are issues coming out of iPhone speakers that are not found in it's kind of like the NS10s idea of like you're mixing to this lowest common denominator making that rip but it's also going to make the hi-fi sound better because you've you've like been like hey this is pretty harsh this is pretty narrow like

29:51 Stephan Hawkes yeah if you're if you're a mix like and this is just crazy because everybody's got a slightly different phone and phone speaker and all

29:57 Luke F. Walton totally

29:57 Stephan Hawkes that but yeah it's still if

29:58 Luke F. Walton got lint

29:59 Stephan Hawkes you're if you're mix yeah if your mix is distorting through the speaker at lower volumes than other things something's wrong

30:12 Stephan Hawkes like i've literally i've used that as a definite reason for fine-tuning my mastering rig over you know i've had some gear over the years converters even that i really liked and then i you notice that like consistently they're a little scratchy or through the phone you know they sound really good on a proper system or headphones but through the phone it gets scratchier sooner and you start going like oh there's something going on with

30:38 Stephan Hawkes filtering and that gets in a whole dorky converter rabbit hole mastering dork thing but that's the phone thing is a real consideration i'll go listen to two things out of my phone that i did when i was when i'd be testing out converters and if one of them is smooth and solid and static free at a loud volume and the other one sounds all sizzly and weird through the phone you gotta pick the other one you probably need to sell the other one and unless it's you know if it happens a few times again anytime

31:06 Stephan Hawkes each time could be a fluke but you know you do that a few times and you start going like i don't even need to know the science here it's just proof's in the pudding i people are going to be listening out of the phone this one's going to sound banging out of the phone i'm going to own this one and then i'll see if i can find something that's better than this but and so that's kind of again the whittling down the phone is is a hugely important part of of whittling down the process at some point these days which i never thought you know i had a gen one iphone and i never thought

31:35 Stephan Hawkes you know that would ever be the case back in the day you just were like oh it's just some trash that stuff you know nobody's going to listen anything out of this but the phone speakers are a lot better and they actually do serve a purpose in just making audio more stable

31:49 Stephan Hawkes so audio got pretty out of control there for a while i feel like uh before the phone and now people have to prioritize stability and excitement not just excitement you know you can't just crush it and make it loud that won't sound good through the phone you got to get it loud and have it be robust and smooth and and it's it's a lot higher bar which is why you see on average most stuff that comes people like to say that stuff doesn't sound as good or whatever is he

32:16 Stephan Hawkes or used to but it's like well you weren't hearing the the demos that people were making before

32:23 Stephan Hawkes you were only hearing high budget records and even some of those don't actually sound that great you

32:28 Luke F. Walton Uh

32:28 Stephan Hawkes know by today's standards they don't have any sub lows or they just weren't very full in the mids there's no guitars on a lot of 90s

32:34 Luke F. Walton Right,

32:34 Stephan Hawkes records there's just like no and i love it like i'm i'm i kind of wish we could still do that but the standards things like the phone and and airpods and all that like they actually have up the need for

32:47 Stephan Hawkes crafting better mixes and so most stuff people know they kind of just want it to sound good out of the phone even if they don't have good monitors they still everyone's got the phone everyone's got airpods you know everyone's got you know something you know beats or whatever like everyone's got these things uh and that's not to be overlooked because now those are the most objective thing is the thing that everyone's going to listen on and luckily you know airpods and airpod pros like they don't reward

33:13 Stephan Hawkes Bad habits. They reward quality mixing, spatial placement, even frequency balance.

33:21 Luke F. Walton Mm

33:21 Stephan Hawkes They don't just make everything sound glossy and clear. Only the stuff that actually sounds expensive sounds expensive in

33:28 Luke F. Walton AirPods.-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

33:30 Stephan Hawkes So it's kind of the great equalizer. It doesn't mean you can make it happen. It just means you can acknowledge whether or not it has happened.

33:38 Luke F. Walton Yes.

33:38 Stephan Hawkes So, yeah.

33:39 Luke F. Walton I want to dig into the, yeah, did records sound better back in the day kind of debate. Do you think that part of that is just people liking the nostalgic, like less top end, less low end? Or do you think like, could you unpack that a little bit for me? I'm just curious.

33:56 Stephan Hawkes When digital started becoming kind of the mainstay in which was around the time I started, like the Digi 01 kind of led to the revolution, you know, of home recorded audio or home studios or, you know, whatever. It wasn't as good, you know, like people who made records in the analog days and the late mid to late 90s switched to digital and all of a sudden the records didn't sound as good.

34:22 Stephan Hawkes I think that's where a lot of that comes from was that transition. The example that I always like, because it's very, very, it's pretty apt is Coldplay. Coldplay albums are the best example because Coldplay made Parachutes before the digital revolution.

34:39 Stephan Hawkes and it's incredible sounding and it's exactly the definition of what a high budget analog professional album should sound like maybe outside of the song yellow which doesn't sound that great but most of the record sounds incredible anyway yellow because it's weird that it's the big hit single it kind of sounds like trash compared to the rest of them but you know that so that band

35:01 Stephan Hawkes If you listen to their albums through the years, that to me, their album releases mirror almost exactly the digital revolution in terms of music production, you know, clocks and all those, the scientists and all that stuff, that stuff's real boring sounding, man. I mean, it's, it sounds like.

35:21 Stephan Hawkes so blah it's so much worse sounding than parachutes it's it's and again classic songs good production you can still overcome that but i mean it's pretty lame and it's the same team and you're just like how is this the same team it's like well they switch tools

35:42 Stephan Hawkes and they hadn't figured it out yet the whole world hadn't figured it out yet and my whole thing when I started was I was immediately trying to make digital sound analog like I didn't have any interest in it being fake and digital that was always kind of my goal but it wasn't everybody's goal and we weren't all achieving it whether we tried or not then you listen to you know the next Coldplay album x and y or whatever it is in like 2004 markedly better sounding and I remember feeling like as I was getting better gear you know I got my

36:09 Stephan Hawkes got my first like i got some livery blues in like 2004 and i remember being like oh my gosh i can get more creamy analog-y sounds that don't sound as harsh and digital and they're they're cooler and have like a a scoop to them in a way that sounds like music and then all of a sudden they come out with an album that sounds more like music and then you know you kind of follow that example and not that there aren't kind of ups and downs in the way certain coldplay albums i'm not like a huge

36:35 Stephan Hawkes use Coldplay's fan or anything I just pay attention to music in general uh and I just found that to be a funny one because I remember in in 2015 when that uh was it Head Full of Ghosts or whatever album came out and it sounds really good like people I don't know if it's a fan favorite for Coldplay fans but I'm not listening to it from that perspective it's it's the first album where you listen to Parachutes and then you listen to that

37:04 Stephan Hawkes then you go we got there like now you can argue that the sonics of head full of ghosts are in many many ways superior to parachutes parachutes is still going to have that just inherent analog high budget thing but man the kicks and snares the way they punch the warmth of the mids the volume the just the movement and things it's like the tools

37:30 Luke F. Walton Ah,

37:30 Stephan Hawkes took a while

37:30 Luke F. Walton yep.

37:31 Stephan Hawkes think about how long it took that's 2015 that's you know 1998 or 99 to 2015 for for me to say that not the people didn't make good records before then in the digital realm there were plenty of good records early on but there were years and years and years of situations where stuff maybe

37:50 Luke F. Walton Hmm.

37:50 Stephan Hawkes didn't sound as good it's like california cation versus blood sex sugar magic like give me a break you know it's like but again it's early digital versus high budget analog so that's that's what happens so i think that's a lot of it even in the late 90s there were a lot of pretty bad

38:07 Stephan Hawkes analog 90s albums like a lot of albums sort of lost their teeth from the mid to late 90s on anyway it was kind of headed that direction there's a lot of like you know bands first couple albums in the early 90s that sound really huge and cool and rocking and then like

38:26 Stephan Hawkes not so great so they had big budgets but they were kind of making like blah records some of the stuff's just not actually as good as we remember anyway so it's like maybe things were kind of headed that way or i don't i don't know but i feel like the big budget record thing kind of started taking a hit even before digital came around and then the digital just sort of cemented it because now you have people that weren't even doing a great job with the analog tools now they're using the digital ones and they don't even realize how much

38:53 Stephan Hawkes is how much worse it is so i think it collectively as a people we all had to figure out how to do that and we all we all had to identify the change there's a lot of guys that they didn't know anything about converters at all they go i'm a bored guy i've mixed it it sounds good and i rule and they didn't realize that with the crappy converters they were now using their tricks didn't work they needed to eq different ranges it wasn't all just going to fall into place anymore and some people grew with that and learned to adapt

39:22 Stephan Hawkes and some people just kept doing it taking photos in front of their big console talking about how cool they were and those people kind of eventually didn't have as much prominence or jobs because eventually everyone went like yeah i don't know man it made a good record in like five years like well what changed you're like well the analog outputs on a stuter tape machine sound a whole lot better those guys are the ones that don't think converters matter

39:46 Stephan Hawkes So they fall into the trap of not realizing that they had the greatest conversion of all. No conversion. They had the thing that can't exist in the digital realm that I have tried to find and search and I've gotten as close as anybody with just neutral conversion. But there is no such thing. So they basically went from not knowing conversion was a thing.

40:06 Stephan Hawkes and having the world's greatest conversion which is none to then thinking conversion didn't matter because they're the coolest and having the world's worst conversion because they didn't put an emphasis on it because it's all in that it's all in the it's all in the hands like i'm the guy it's like those guys that were complacent like that's not good and i've there's plenty of examples of that and i'm not gonna call anybody out but like you just hear guys work on it and never come back

40:34 Stephan Hawkes And part of it is because they didn't realize that they weren't in Kansas anymore. You know, it wasn't the free you just just the sound coming off a tape machine. It makes you seem so smart. I made tape machine recordings on an eight track NCI one inch and dumped them into Pro Tools like kind of early into when I started. I thought I was some kind of super genius.

40:54 Stephan Hawkes I was the 18 year old kid prodigy who had figured out how to make records only six months in that were classics. You know like yeah tape man made that real easy tape and a board made that real easy to think that and then like the reality sets in

41:08 Luke F. Walton I already interrupt this very important broadcast, but it's time for one more advertisement for myself for this podcast. 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.

41:27 Luke F. Walton Under there it says rate show and you go and you click it five stars if you could do that for me That's the best way for the algorithms all that 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,

41:43 Luke F. Walton 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. Do you think part of this is is the change in expectation for low end as well where because like low end creates such a it takes up so much space in a mix and

42:02 Stephan Hawkes Yeah.

42:03 Luke F. Walton to get like the punchy modern loud low end that's pretty much cross genre at this point i feel like that's a really big paradigm and mentality shift as

42:12 Stephan Hawkes Yeah. And the thing is, is in the 90s, your stereos had it.

42:16 Luke F. Walton Huh. Yeah.

42:17 Stephan Hawkes that stupid that stupid premiere stereo with the dolphin on it that's where the low end came from

42:22 Luke F. Walton Cool.

42:22 Stephan Hawkes so in our minds those records were full range we had home systems with the loudness button and we had the eq curves and they made those records pretty balanced or a little thin but they didn't bother with that because they're stirring vegas sub in the trunk dude i mean i remember getting carted around and you know buddy's older brother's cars they'd be listening to pantera or something

42:45 Stephan Hawkes or something and you're just like this thing's got just i mean that it was the car there's no sub low in those kick drums there's no sub low in any i mean there was a handful of things and when that started happening you took notice that's like def tones around the fur came out and i was like there's a there's sub low and in a kick drum and it's synthetically generated which i don't care how you generate it i just remember the first time i heard the song around the fur

43:15 Stephan Hawkes i was in a car and it hit hard in a different way i was like a kid and it was like uh what's this is new like this is new and it's because it had an actual sub frequency a punchy sub frequency hitting that like you know other kick drums on albums that have incredible drums that i love like soundgarden super unknown you know stuff like that it's like dude still incredible sounds incredible recordings recordings

43:43 Stephan Hawkes but they don't have that you know and then that's fine and i never noticed as a kid you know you had your bass boost on your on your walk on your walkman your discman car stereo boosted it up and subs everywhere dude i had this banging stereo when i was younger that just had the coolest subs and every record i listened to sounded huge and punchy they don't sound like that on my monitors now it's not because my monitors now are lying to me

44:08 Stephan Hawkes it's because we just don't live in that world anymore so it's definitely an evolution of you know it's kind of a weird one because like we weren't having to work for it and now you have to work for it things things are very very very different and now low-end management again that's the thing is like being able to do the low-end thing is kind of the thing that separates you know the men from the boys and and everybody kind of knows that doesn't

44:33 Stephan Hawkes Uh mean you can-huh. do it So understanding how to, you know, stuff people do, you know, obviously just in order to get that, whatever you got to do to get that.

44:42 Stephan Hawkes you got to do to get that and there's there's cheap ways to do it that we've all done we've all done the fake low-end thing sometimes you actually can carve it out correctly and make it happen for real but next best thing is cheating your way to the finish line and nobody will know the difference except you it matters whether people realize it or not and it is the hardest thing for people to get right the only caveat is that a lot of these like pre-made sounds that people use when they're

45:10 Stephan Hawkes when they're using making beats and stuff kind

45:11 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

45:11 Stephan Hawkes of are already dialed in by somebody who knew better

45:14 Luke F. Walton exactly.

45:15 Stephan Hawkes But

45:15 Luke F. Walton sometimes

45:15 Stephan Hawkes the second you take those people out of that arena, they realize they have no idea how to actually get it.

45:21 Luke F. Walton yep yep

45:21 Stephan Hawkes So they were getting it for free. It's like, take the tracks I get sent from some band in the Midwest or something to mix that was recorded with their local guy. You get those tracks and you tell me how much of a genius you feel like because he doesn't have any of that.

45:36 Luke F. Walton i swear i think about that all the time when i like especially the aaa list uh uh mix engineers it's

45:42 Stephan Hawkes Yeah,

45:43 Luke F. Walton like y'all are mixing on easy mode you get great sounding stuff all the time like i'll be at the nam show and they'll do like a mixing walkthrough and they're like these this is the raw it's like

45:52 Stephan Hawkes yeah

45:53 Luke F. Walton That's ridiculous.

45:54 Stephan Hawkes it's no that's no joke dude i tell people about this all the time i'm like i'm like yeah it's cool like that thing worked and like that that was the way it kind of was like not that mixing engineers didn't matter we obviously have heard stories of like the mixing engineer coming in and saving the day or

46:10 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

46:10 Stephan Hawkes the

46:10 Luke F. Walton certainly.

46:11 Stephan Hawkes mixes the label didn't like these mixes and then the label likes these mixes that is 100

46:18 Stephan Hawkes real it's like not even close to real and i know because i've had records where i mix most of the records that i track um you know i mix and master most of them although i can i don't mind having somebody else master if there's the right the right guy or the right budget for the right guy but i usually mix and master most of my own stuff and i've had a few situations where people were like this guy did a record 15 years ago that i really like or 20 years whatever it is

46:47 Stephan Hawkes and we're gonna send it to him to mix and and i'll listen to what the people did that they like and then i'll listen to what they've been doing lately

46:56 Stephan Hawkes and then i'll listen to the band that i'm working with versus the kind of stuff they usually do

47:02 Stephan Hawkes sometimes those guys are those guys still sometimes those guys were just the product of their time and the tracks were so good and that's an art in and of itself like that's like That's a hard thing in and of itself. So

47:17 Luke F. Walton Oh,

47:18 Stephan Hawkes not to

47:18 Luke F. Walton yeah.

47:18 Stephan Hawkes disparage that idea. That's a thing. I call that honest mixing. Like these tracks are really good. How do you make everything better?

47:26 Stephan Hawkes when it doesn't need fixing how do you elevate incredible tracks i call that like honest mixing where you're basically like it's not going to be necessarily the like solving all these problems it's just about maximizing what's there you know one of the best honest mixing guys that i think is andy wallace you know, Annie Walls is obviously most, if you listen to rock in the 90s and beyond,

47:52 Stephan Hawkes you know, it's like Annie Walls is probably your hero or he probably makes one of your top 10 favorite albums, if not eight of them.

47:58 Luke F. Walton Mm

47:58 Stephan Hawkes When you become an adult, you realize he was getting great tracks. You know, we got these multi tracks out there and you can hear the unmixed tracks from Rage Against the Machine or the Nirvana multi tracks and Butch Vig sitting there showing you and like. oh man like they

48:18 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

48:18 Stephan Hawkes they spent time and money and and they had good gear and you know it was recorded at sound city and it sounded good right off the board and so that doesn't take away from the genius of an andy wallace at all they had a they had a job they executed it the end of the day that's the job Whatever it takes is the job.

48:40 Stephan Hawkes And in that situation, him doing a bunch of weird stuff and mangling it and ruining it just to show off all the things he could do, that would have been not doing the job. If you send Andy Wallace the majority of things I get sent to mix, I'm not sure you'd be thrilled.

48:58 Luke F. Walton friends have done the same thing where they'll record like the bedroom pop like lo-fi kind of stuff and they'll send it to an a-lister spend a bunch of money on it and they'll be like oh the one that i sent to my friend to mix for 400 sounds a lot better than the one i spent four thousand dollars on oops

49:13 Stephan Hawkes Yeah. Yeah. And that's, again, there's different guys. So there's the guys that can. that kept up there's

49:18 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

49:19 Stephan Hawkes the guys that were concerned with the trends and then there's the guys that were good at the dexterity and all-around ability you have to really gauge the people you're going to work with not on what they've done at their best but what they are capable of doing it's like if all you've ever recorded is the world's greatest vocalist in the world's greatest studio

49:44 Stephan Hawkes that doesn't mean you're going to be able to take an SM7 recorded home track and make the guy sound like the world's greatest singer all that means for all you know the engineer there's the guy who set it up and all they did was sit in the booth and tell you'd be surprised how easy the job can be the better the talent the easier the job the you know the better the studio the easier the job the better the engineer the easier the job so it's like

50:06 Stephan Hawkes There are literally people that are just, and again, usually they're more tastemakers or they understand those little things or they have a guy who they mixes it the way they want. You know, there's a reason guys like Mutt Lang always set their stuff to the same guys. It's a symbiotic relationship there.

50:22 Luke F. Walton Exactly. Yep.

50:23 Stephan Hawkes You send your tracks to that guy, maybe that guy is going to do his thing. I have heard examples where, man, that guy actually will impart his thing upon anything you send him.

50:34 Stephan Hawkes i am one of those guys for sure i you know i will bend and i will i will do it i will bend anything to That's be fine i will fix everything if it can be fixed i will fix it um but i've heard big name guys that have you know i've heard guys that do that and when you hear that put the smile on my face someone paid for this guy and they got this guy and that guy was concerned with the upholding of his standards but man the thing you're talking about

51:04 Stephan Hawkes where people just get ripped off and or just mixes come back and it's just like you know that is more common it's a lot more common um i guess i do know why people are a lot of people aren't super introspective and maybe confidence is on high and uh you

51:23 Luke F. Walton I think part

51:23 Stephan Hawkes know they

51:23 Luke F. Walton of it is saying like, oh, you should have sent me better tracks that's on you.

51:28 Stephan Hawkes and they do that mastering guys do that to people mixing guys do that to people it's the i've had this conversation with a lot of people that is the absolutely the craziest mentality I

51:40 Luke F. Walton I agree.

51:41 Stephan Hawkes have ever heard it'd be like if if your plumbing uh you know burst in your house and the plumber came over and goes well should have upgraded these pipes sooner I mean they were old What good is that going to do anyone, man? It's like the house smells like shit. What good? That is not the advice.

52:01 Stephan Hawkes The advice is whatever the good pipes are now, you install them and you make it so no one ever knows that these pipes ruptured. It's not.

52:11 Stephan Hawkes it's over the ship has sailed on that these are the tracks and they paid for them and some guy made them and they prepped them and they sent them to you this idea like and with mastering i see that a lot with guys and i understand there is respect the product is a thing if

52:25 Luke F. Walton Mm hmm.

52:26 Stephan Hawkes it's a respectable product to begin with if you can't tell the difference between a world-class mix that needs the light touch the velvet glove that needs to do no harm The enhance without changing approach, which

52:43 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

52:43 Stephan Hawkes is a very mature and high level mastering approach to take. How do I make this way louder without making it any worse and actually subtly enhancing it, but without changing it? That's hard. That's high level stuff. A lot of people can't do that.

53:02 Stephan Hawkes But the idea of taking that approach when you receive a mix that sounds like it needs a lot of help, it's professional negligence. I mean, it's fraud. I don't know how to explain it. Like, it's infuriating to me. Like, I would just someone call the Better Business Bureau. I just do not, I do not understand what people understand, what they think the job is. The people sent you the thing. to make it sound good it's

53:31 Luke F. Walton Yep.

53:31 Stephan Hawkes always to try and improve and make things sound as good as possible they didn't say if you think this can be made to sound good then we'll pay you they paid you to fix it and to make it the best it can be if that takes more out of you that's your day or turn it down if you're not willing

53:50 Luke F. Walton Mm

53:50 Stephan Hawkes to do

53:51 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

53:51 Stephan Hawkes the work

53:51 Luke F. Walton Mm

53:51 Stephan Hawkes turn

53:52 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

53:52 Stephan Hawkes it down the second i take someone's money for something that means it's on me to

53:57 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

53:58 Stephan Hawkes to the farthest conceivable limit i can come up with it's on me from there and i'll gripe while i'm doing it i can sit here alone in the studio and i can be like man these ghost notes are so quiet why do they think now they're going to want to hear them in the mix even though i can't even see them on the wave I can, I can, I can bitch about it here. I can't just send them the thing back with no ghost notes.

54:21 Luke F. Walton Right. Yep.

54:22 Stephan Hawkes I mean, you could, but I'm not going to. Uh, and, and a lot of times, you know, that's where the budget of the record, you know, really, which is just the time spent on the record, it goes to the things that are needed the most. So maybe most of the things are good, but some things not there. Well, you're just going to spend a lot of time fixing that one thing.

54:44 Stephan Hawkes because the rest of it was good but you can't just go well this was an easy mix project i did it it all worked really straightforward can't hear the ghost notes at all but they should have recorded that snare a little better the guy should just go so it's harder send it off it's like

54:59 Stephan Hawkes there's one thing wrong with it and you're not going to fix it they paid you they're probably worried about the ghost notes man they're

55:05 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

55:05 Stephan Hawkes not in any of the roughs the

55:06 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

55:07 Stephan Hawkes guy's doing all this detailed work nothing you think he's not worried about that you think the drummer's not going oh everyone keeps telling me to wait and eventually i'll hear them what if you don't do it they're never going to hear them like

55:19 Stephan Hawkes it's a crazy yeah it's a crazy concept to me and there's way too much of that and and it's you know it's the results-based business it's literally smoke and mirrors the whole job is fake sound is not even real objectively i mean it's all fake it's all

55:37 Stephan Hawkes the best you can do it's all cheating look when i say oh i need to move the guitars up and out of the way of the drums that is not that does not mean anything that is not a physical thing it's not real 90 of people can't even hear it or identify what you're talking about so if the whole job is just hocus pocus fantasy fluff talk anyway what were you going to take the ethical thing where everything has to be there like etched in stone it doesn't make any sense

56:03 Stephan Hawkes That's like the whole job is literally smoke and mirrors and creating, using, capturing sound waves to create art that's not even visual. And it's crazy.

56:15 Luke F. Walton It

56:16 Stephan Hawkes So

56:16 Luke F. Walton is.

56:16 Stephan Hawkes you shouldn't take the approach of like, well, you know, they should have done it better if none of it's real, dude, none of it's real. So if it's all just make believe, make it the best it can be. Like if it's all just open to interpretation.

56:31 Stephan Hawkes and could be it could be anything because it's just sound so one person hears a record and hates it one person hears a record and likes it but

56:38 Luke F. Walton Mm everybody hmm.

56:39 Stephan Hawkes is going to notice that there's no ghost notes and

56:41 Luke F. Walton Yes.

56:41 Stephan Hawkes some people might enjoy the record better without the ghost notes so i get the totality of the argument a producer saying i think the ghost notes are distracting That's a discussion to be had sure

56:53 Luke F. Walton That's a decision to be made.

56:56 Stephan Hawkes and sometimes bands have made it hey man Yep. you just they sound a little busy and you sort of just seem like you're doing them as a reflex we pump them up a little bit but like you know there's a lead vocal in the center channel as well and uh you know but you're making a musical special record where a lot of thought was put into the patterns and

57:16 Luke F. Walton the exactly

57:16 Stephan Hawkes and it's it's delicate it's like you have to account for that stuff it's just what they paid you to do it's not optional in my opinion some

57:24 Luke F. Walton totally

57:24 Stephan Hawkes people consider it to be highly optional yes

57:26 Luke F. Walton yes and and like there's that difference and it's a it's a tricky line of giving your opinion and your professional like spin on it but allowing the original vision to shine through where i've had

57:37 Luke F. Walton had i've had ones where yeah my drummer is playing really intricate really cool patterns you get it back snare sound replaced kick sound sound replaced and the detail level of the sound replace was not narrow enough to capture any of the ghost notes so it's like completely different drum part just different sounds different

57:54 Stephan Hawkes and

57:55 Luke F. Walton vibes it's like

57:55 Stephan Hawkes less than the thing you're used to hearing if

57:57 Luke F. Walton exactly and i

57:58 Stephan Hawkes it's in the rough and they're used to hearing it that's the other thing is like people just like ah the roughs you know i'm gonna do my do my thing and they disregard the roughs you might want to listen to those roughs man like

58:07 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

58:08 Stephan Hawkes that's

58:08 Luke F. Walton yeah,

58:08 Stephan Hawkes literally all the band has been listening to since the tracking got done is

58:13 Luke F. Walton yeah yeah.

58:24 Stephan Hawkes if it's if it's 80 percent different and only 20 percent better. take don't send that to them take a second think about it you know yeah maybe you went a little too far here you changed some things and you're not like you're gonna have to start over but you're gonna need to at least consider a pivot to the rough to what was good about the rough

58:51 Stephan Hawkes you know yeah i went through and i scooped out all these frequencies that they told me on the tutorial it's like that may not have needed done man if

58:57 Luke F. Walton Exactly.

58:58 Stephan Hawkes you scoop out the low mids on a bunch of tracks over and over and over again and you listen to the roughs and they sound kind of nice you probably didn't need to do that you're just going to end up getting notes say this thing's cold and it's edgy and it's harsh and the charm is gone because again where is the charm the mid-range it's all it's

59:17 Luke F. Walton It's

59:17 Stephan Hawkes in the

59:17 Luke F. Walton good.

59:17 Stephan Hawkes mid-range it's

59:18 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

59:18 Stephan Hawkes all right. in the mid-range people

59:19 Luke F. Walton Totally.

59:19 Stephan Hawkes do that all the time they look at a guitar and they go oh i gotta open up a fab filter and i gotta do all this stuff and i gotta and you have to you can't have any guitars can't have any frequencies below 100 hertz and then you have to find yeah it's like that's not all just true it's true sometimes sometimes guitars just sound really nice and just need a little bit of eq

59:42 Stephan Hawkes to tonally sit them in the mix and they don't need wide cuts and high passes and low passes things just nothing always needs the same thing is that idea that you just have to do this stuff is is preposterous and can't be true objectively

59:59 Luke F. Walton I've got some big news everybody my vinyl record is out we didn't make a ton of these these guys are going to sell out and I'd love for you to get your hands on one of them because they're so dope they're so dope

60:11 Luke F. Walton And it comes with a whole bunch of like liner notes and pictures and special stuff, the things that really went into making this record. And I want you to get your hands on it. So go to scoobertdoobert.pizza or check out my Instagram for a link or click the link in the show notes or the bio or wherever you're watching this to pick up your copy.

60:30 Luke F. Walton You know, they're going to sell out. We really did not make very many of these and I want you to have it. It's like a collector's item. So. Thank you. Thank you for supporting my music and I can't wait for you to hear it actually on physical vinyl. Enjoy the rest of the episode.

60:44 Luke F. Walton yeah and that's i feel like that's the nugget of this whole conversation is you're applying tools to the inputs into the problems that you're facing rather than seeing like like a template rather than applying the same tool just because i always do i've got a workflow i watch this mixing tutorial which mixing tutorials can be very weird to me because it's like that's this song like how like i don't know sometimes you can get things out of it because you see what people the way people think about audio that's

61:12 Luke F. Walton that's that's the important part to take Yeah out of it though rather than like oh great like copy down the frequencies that he shifted and i'll do that to my guitars you know yeah

61:19 Stephan Hawkes Yeah, you know, that's what I'm saying. It's the why not the what so it's like I'll separate the why and the what

61:25 Stephan Hawkes from people a lot i'll hear what they're saying and it's like okay so this is their general vibe these are the things that they like and then you go well this is the thing that they're doing and

61:34 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

61:35 Stephan Hawkes there's usually a disconnect between the things that they say and the things that they do with everybody very few people are just uniformly everything checks out it's like no you know the guy's like i like this and you're like well that's your genre of stuff doesn't do that do you really want me to do that do you want to make a indie record with a metal kick drum you know like

61:51 Stephan Hawkes you don't want that you know i could do that but you don't really probably want that you might but you probably don't and so even when somebody says something like that it's not about doing just doing oh well put a metal kick drum in there and i did my job it's like no what is it about metal kick drums people like how could the idea of a metal kick drum be useful in an indie production maybe they just want it a little punchier than your average indie album

62:21 Stephan Hawkes You can get you can go for punchier you don't have to go for completely flat and again There's nothing wrong with that a lot of indie records have purposefully thin and flat kick drums because it's not about the kick drum

62:32 Stephan Hawkes But they might want a little more of that thing so even when somebody says something you go that's he's talking about Gojira and he's making any just listen to him Think about what he means by it and what how you can use that information and I'm literally just like I'm like a supercomputer just collecting this data from people all day long.

62:52 Stephan Hawkes If you meet people and you listen to them, you don't have to ruin their record by doing strictly what they said.

63:00 Stephan Hawkes trying to be some kind of too smart you know too smart for your own good yeah it's our any record but it sounds like a metal record and it's like well that was just the drummer talking about kick drums did you think what did the singer say did he also say i want to sound like a metal band you know it's like so you just you kind of have to get all of this stuff and infer all of these details from people and then when you go to make make the version one which again i'm mostly most mixing on records i do attend in mixing with people

63:27 Stephan Hawkes people for sure and i love doing that or mix with a producer i mean that's great being the tool being the guy who shows the producer the options or doing a remote session and being like i can do this a b and c way and then getting real-time feedback i love that the reality is the majority of the records i've made in my life the band left the studio or left town or flew home or whatever and then whenever i was in the mood whenever the mood struck me which hopefully wasn't too long from when they left

63:57 Stephan Hawkes um i made this entire crazy album with only the stuff that we talked about and the and the tracks in front of me i've got the tracks what the tracks say i've got what the people said i've got all the common sense in between and the next thing i send people because again i mix and master my own records i send people a version one and it's called the old v1

64:22 Stephan Hawkes mix master production this could be your album not that i don't want your notes because i definitely want your notes and your feedback but if the hard drive crashed tomorrow or the world ended tomorrow or maybe if you guys just all didn't have any notes this could just be released and i i'm doing eight

64:43 Stephan Hawkes billion things in there to make it to i'm making so many decisions about vocal wetness and front to back depth the roominess of the drums all these decisions i'm making alone i'm sitting in a room alone drinking a coffee fielding text messages

65:02 Stephan Hawkes sitting there and getting into the zone and you can get into the zone and waste a whole day i mean i don't do it so much anymore but it'll always you know you you get in the zone usually it's good that's the thing about getting better at the job there's less wasted days it's a straighter path on

65:22 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

65:23 Stephan Hawkes most projects

65:24 Luke F. Walton Good point.

65:24 Stephan Hawkes um

65:24 Luke F. Walton I agree.

65:25 Stephan Hawkes the analogy that i always heard in uh that i heard in like stand-up comedy was like Any comedian can bomb, but it's like Russian roulette. You just get more chambers in the gun and you're less likely to eat the bullet, which isn't the most politically correct way to say it. I feel like that really applies. I mean, it definitely applies to stand-up comedy, but it really also applies to mixing and

65:49 Luke F. Walton Mm

65:49 Stephan Hawkes mastering.

65:50 Luke F. Walton -hmm. Yeah.

65:50 Stephan Hawkes Getting, being able to mix a record good once, that is an achievement, but it's not as much of an achievement as that person who does it for the first time thinks it is. Because usually that means the next one isn't good.

66:02 Stephan Hawkes So if you can mix a hundred records in a row and get minimal feedbacks and notes from bands, no overhauls. no

66:12 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

66:12 Stephan Hawkes baby man this really missed the mark or we're really not happy with it you can do that 100 times in a row that's professionalism like that's high that's the goal the goal is to never get anything other than just general kind of notes creative stuff that's in their mind

66:31 Luke F. Walton exactly

66:31 Stephan Hawkes that you know great

66:32 Luke F. Walton yep totally

66:32 Stephan Hawkes give me your feedback it's your band like i did all this stuff you feel free to have some ideas you know i'm

66:38 Luke F. Walton totally yeah

66:38 Stephan Hawkes excited for your input ideas you

66:40 Luke F. Walton or

66:41 Stephan Hawkes know yeah

66:41 Luke F. Walton like or like like you're saying like a very creative idea of hey like this vocal sounds great but i'm just not feeling like as much reverb on this thing i

66:49 Stephan Hawkes great

66:50 Luke F. Walton want more

66:50 Stephan Hawkes i

66:50 Luke F. Walton delay cool

66:50 Stephan Hawkes i'll you know so anything so when i'm setting up a mix i i always i mean that's the other thing that i think a lot of people don't don't like i set up a mix with sort of multiple fallback plans so

67:01 Luke F. Walton Cool.

67:02 Stephan Hawkes i

67:03 Luke F. Walton Cool idea.

67:03 Stephan Hawkes it's not like i have three mixes set up but i have treated some of the i've spent enough time with some of the primary tracks and treated them a couple different ways so that when the notes come back i probably already have a solution

67:23 Luke F. Walton Cool.

67:23 Stephan Hawkes to get us there and i can overhaul i can overhaul a v1 like not only to like a ridiculous degree but ridiculously fast like and i'll tell people i go listen if i miss something if i miss the point on v1 if just tell me

67:47 Stephan Hawkes Because I probably did I was dick in between this wet and that wet I was dick between you know Maybe I got a little too crazy and was having a little too creative with the vocal effects And then I sent you guys the most extreme version where I was testing the edges if you think I can't pull that stuff down like that

68:05 Stephan Hawkes and like just say just just literally in plain english just say what it is you don't like and what it is you would like it to be and there's like a real good chance that i'm literally 20 minutes of adjusting Yeah, literally

68:19 Luke F. Walton yeah.

68:19 Stephan Hawkes like A couple mastering EQ knobs in the mid-range, bringing down some vocal reverb 3dB, switching out a vocal compressor to be something that's a little more whatever, less intimate, more intimate, something, you know, less in your face, more in your face, switching out to a different kick drum sample underneath the real sample so that they, so

68:41 Luke F. Walton Yep.

68:41 Stephan Hawkes because it was too clicky.

68:42 Luke F. Walton Yes.

68:42 Stephan Hawkes Adjusting a few EQs, you send over version two. Oh my God, you fixed it. Yeah. because i was always going to fix it but they'll they might think it was like some huge endeavor and

68:53 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

68:53 Stephan Hawkes it's like no i already envisioned this record a few ways and if i don't have a game plan to fix it my life's the one that's going to be destroyed not yours like you're just going like we want this you send off an email and you go back to your life like that email determines how nice my tuesday is so

69:12 Luke F. Walton Yeah. Right.

69:12 Stephan Hawkes like my ability to solve that email

69:15 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

69:16 Stephan Hawkes is my quality of life it's

69:18 Luke F. Walton Yep.

69:18 Stephan Hawkes the difference between getting out of the studio at seven o'clock and going to a nice dinner and having a nice evening with my wife and dog as opposed to i'm going to be at the studio till 10 30 banging my head against the wall so like that's the other thing you realize is that like this gear isn't a shopping addiction at least not in my case not to say that i don't have some of that but it's

69:41 Stephan Hawkes it the gear having the right gear gets you home sooner which keeps your mental health better which keeps your your your morale people don't people in bands especially some people realize it but people in bands if you've been in a band like i was i'm a band guy to this day definitely a born and read born born and raised band guy and if if you're a smart band guy you realize that the band rises or falls based on morale morale

70:11 Stephan Hawkes We got this good show we're looking forward to. The recording is going well.

70:15 Luke F. Walton Yes.

70:15 Stephan Hawkes We're doing a music video. We might be getting to open up for so-and-so. The same thing applies to being a producer engineer. If things are going well, you'll do better work. You're more confident.

70:32 Luke F. Walton Mm

70:32 Stephan Hawkes You

70:32 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

70:32 Stephan Hawkes don't have any of that imposter syndrome that everyone always has. And there's a reason every podcast ever about this job talks about imposter syndrome. It's because to some degree, most people have some degree of it. The imposter syndrome for me comes from when I'm running into the same problems over and over again and I'm not. solving them Mm the

70:55 Luke F. Walton hmm. Mm hmm.

70:56 Stephan Hawkes gear doing what i needed to do kind of indemnifies you against that and

71:01 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

71:02 Stephan Hawkes so i started i i figured this out because i had no work-life balance you know no work-life balance when i was younger just

71:11 Stephan Hawkes just destroying myself working 14 to 19 hour days bands in town other records not mixed with everything took forever was pure passion and ability like i wasn't like i don't think these records that i made when i was younger they're they're good people like them and i still think they sound really cool but what it took out of me how hard it was to do the mountains i had to move and the hours i had to work you

71:36 Stephan Hawkes like i could do that again i have i'll do it if that's the project and whatever if that's the project and that's the budget i'm still built for that studio grind but

71:46 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

71:48 Stephan Hawkes Right around 2013-2014, I realized that if you want to at least have a chance of having a semblance of a normal life, you've got to nail work-life balance. Well, what works there? Well, if the records go smoothly, you'll

72:01 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

72:01 Stephan Hawkes get work-life balance.

72:02 Luke F. Walton Yep.

72:02 Stephan Hawkes Okay? Well, anything that's making the records not go smoothly, you need to get rid of.

72:06 Luke F. Walton Yes.

72:07 Stephan Hawkes And the fundamental stuff, the infrastructure-related studio stuff.

72:13 Luke F. Walton Yes.

72:14 Stephan Hawkes It needs to be upgraded in the right way, not just spent more money on. You need to find the monitor controller that works for your system. You

72:23 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

72:23 Stephan Hawkes need to find the headphone routing and the cable routing and the mastering compressor or the whatever it is.

72:29 Luke F. Walton Mm

72:29 Stephan Hawkes And

72:30 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

72:30 Stephan Hawkes you only identify what that is through having problems and things not going well. And you don't want it to be six months.

72:38 Stephan Hawkes I mean, I've had six months of my life ruined by pieces of gear or something stupid that you bought or that you stopped doing or started doing. You want to get that time down to like a couple days.

72:53 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

72:53 Stephan Hawkes When I buy equipment now, i buy equipment now it's not about the possibility of what it could be it's like this thing better not disrupt this awesome thing i've got going on

72:54 Stephan Hawkes it's not about the possibility of what it could be. And it better actually improve things like I don't even get excited, you know, I've had some insanely expensive landmark mastering gear purchases and the excitement I'm not excited until I've proven I'm better off for having it.

73:23 Luke F. Walton Yes.

73:23 Stephan Hawkes The

73:24 Luke F. Walton Yes.

73:24 Stephan Hawkes excitement really only comes when I'm doing the work and everything is going faster and better for

73:30 Luke F. Walton Yes.

73:30 Stephan Hawkes a six week period, then

73:32 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

73:33 Stephan Hawkes I start to get excited. but like sooner than six weeks you don't know really like usually for me

73:41 Luke F. Walton now Yeah.

73:41 Stephan Hawkes it's about six weeks of something like i'll know for sure doesn't mean there aren't things where i know right away it's good But you might be surprised, like, give it six weeks and you'll really find out if you're paying attention. A lot of people don't pay attention or don't know how to test stuff or don't consider things.

74:02 Stephan Hawkes And so they get better. They're spending more money, but now they've entered a field of thing that they are familiar with.

74:08 Luke F. Walton Yes.

74:09 Stephan Hawkes I did

74:10 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

74:10 Stephan Hawkes that. I bought some really expensive mastering equipment and it was all great, but some of it didn't play nice with each other.

74:17 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

74:17 Stephan Hawkes And all of a sudden I spent I spent tens of thousands of dollars on top level dream gear and I'm running into these problems and

74:25 Luke F. Walton Yep.

74:25 Stephan Hawkes it's I've got them plugged in in the wrong order. You do that, you take a piece of equipment that rules and realize that you've just got it plugged in in an order that doesn't sound its best.

74:35 Stephan Hawkes or some piece of gear has an homage impedance that's different than some other piece of gear and you contact both manufacturers to find out that those two pieces of gear should not be plugged into each other under any circumstances and you've been doing that for six months you

74:50 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

74:51 Stephan Hawkes do that i've done all that that's a real example you do that and you stop being that excited about gear

74:59 Stephan Hawkes every time if i buy something if it's a duplicate i go well when it gets here i'm going to compare it to my other one and if it's not as good i'm have to sell it and do this all over again that's not fun you know someone who has a clothing addiction or shopping addiction they don't look at it that way this these are tools they have to perform they have to work and i take like

75:18 Stephan Hawkes little to no joy in buying equipment it's a it's a task now it's a proving

75:23 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

75:24 Stephan Hawkes i have to prove it Right. great i gotta sit here and i gotta pull up test files and i gotta do ab's and i i gotta take things home and i gotta listen and i gotta i gotta be real introspective about all this six grand i just spent on something you know it's a weird mentality to have but the other way just leads to you ruining your tracks with new equipment because you're excited you I did it. People do it.

75:47 Luke F. Walton It's really good advice. So

75:49 Stephan Hawkes Yeah.

75:49 Luke F. Walton I want to ask you one final question. The

75:51 Stephan Hawkes Yeah.

75:51 Luke F. Walton show is called Love Music More. This segment is called Love Music Why? This is just a chance for you to talk about just at the highest level, why do you love music? Why do you still feel passionate about this? Why have you been doing it for so long and why do you want to keep doing it for so long?

76:06 Stephan Hawkes I think it's a good, it's a really, really, really good question. The answer is going to be a lot, but.

76:12 Stephan Hawkes I think people underestimate the degree to which we are inherently compulst to do certain things. I find the idea of human free will to be kind of laughable. It's like we're not just going to wake up and make any choice every day. We make one of like two or three. Now you could do anything. That's the idea of free will. Yeah, I don't know, man. Not really.

76:39 Stephan Hawkes we're not in some ways human beings are incredible and and special and in some ways we're just like a little bit more sentient than dogs you know dogs just don't know how to tell us that they're full of shit so like you know everyone thinks they're gonna you know oh the human mind and i think there's like a handful of those people on planet earth that ever advance the human cause the rest of us are getting up

77:05 Stephan Hawkes And we're just instinctually more like honeybees than, you know, geniuses. We just are compulsed to do things. That's why we still, that's why even with the music industry not being as lucrative, we still have infinite number of people writing songs and paying hard money to make albums. You cannot count out the idea of human will to do the things that make you happy.

77:31 Stephan Hawkes not even if they don't make you happy just to do the things that you do you literally are doing it it doesn't matter what you say about yourself what you think none of that really matters at the end of the day you are the things that you spend time doing and so you know i don't know why music is so built in to me i don't know why

78:00 Stephan Hawkes um it doesn't really matter why because it is true and i do think you know i'm definitely as we kind of discussed i like to get into a thing and burrow to the end of it i like to i'm a completist in a lot of ways i you know it's like well guitar tone huh

78:22 Stephan Hawkes 20 years later you have this wall of amps and and you've listened to every speaker ever and you spent you know so it's like i'm kind of that way in general and there is something boring about just being like yeah i'm good at the thing it's like if you could get so good at shooting three pointers that you never missed that'd be boring right it's the chance that you might miss that makes things exciting and

78:47 Stephan Hawkes upping the degree of difficulty in things makes life more interesting so i think part of the reason that music appeals to me is that i am fully aware i can never be the best and even the guys that are the best aren't the best all the time it's a never-ending journey end up with physical proof of what you were capable of at the time

79:13 Stephan Hawkes there aren't a lot of endeavors that are like that there just aren't a lot of things that people do with their time or they do for a career are you know i just did this stuff and then i'm gonna have to do it again tomorrow um and when i'm done with it you know as long as i do it nobody's gonna get mad at me or something this is not that kind of job this is the job where you're gonna spend a whole lifetime ups and downs yings and you're gonna go back and forth and you can never truly

79:43 Stephan Hawkes be perfect at it you can always be improving and that's exciting like if i'm on if i'm going down a rabbit hole and i'm trying to figure out how to solve some problem

79:53 Stephan Hawkes that's exciting like my brain is more the synapses are firing my brain is active i wake up without an alarm if i got stuff going on i'm just i mean it's crazy man i don't i'm like a machine if there's stuff going on if there's a thing to solve and and and stuff you know keeps you engaged and keeps you active there aren't a lot of other things that are like that where you can

80:16 Stephan Hawkes Just be constantly proving yourself and you know and on any given day you literally might be the best person for these specific job

80:25 Stephan Hawkes In music you'll never necessarily know that but if the thing comes out incredible and there's the proof So in some ways it's you can just leave a legacy of the things and people do notice I mean I have people hit me up and they're talking about records that I made 8 10 12 15 years ago

80:43 Stephan Hawkes that I'm still very very proud of and they'll say things to you about yourself and you'll go oh I'm they're right even they just listed albums over a 10 or 15 year span and on all of those records regardless of where I was in my life which studio I was at what gear I used I was compelled to bend that audio to

81:07 Stephan Hawkes place the audio to crack it out i had a thing and i was compulsed to do it across the years across the decades because that's who i am and that's pretty wild like that's a pretty wild concept

81:23 Stephan Hawkes it's not something I think about daily because then you just be like living in the past or something but I think about it more than most people because it's kind of the answer to your question it's like I'm trying to become the better version of myself there is no perfect there's just the best I can do and then giving people their art

81:44 Stephan Hawkes in a way they can be proud of is an extremely gratifying feeling you know when you send someone a final mix or a final master and you know they tell you they broke down in tears because they could they're so it's probably the relief of the thing coming out good but also the pride a lot of it's the relief i don't care what it is you take somebody who puts in all this sweat equity and all this work and all this time for the thing they're compulsed to do

82:13 Stephan Hawkes and the thing that you're compulst to do causes them a true human emotion or a moment not to mention the other people that are going to listen to it you know that's that's crazy that goes just beyond me as like a music fan growing up in the 90s listening to nirvana and you know like that's cool and all for me that's my musical journey and and you know i love there's plenty of stuff that i love that's personal to me

82:40 Stephan Hawkes and that's great but that's a separate thing nobody nobody cares when they hire you to make a record how much you like nirvana or something it doesn't matter you know how much you like nirvana when you were eight nine years old that's not that's not going to come up can you make their dreams come true their artistic subjective budget limited usually dreams come true

83:03 Stephan Hawkes like what on a daily basis my entire job is taking someone's hard-earned they had to get a practice space or write it and get an interface and demo it and track it again and sing it with their chest and their body all the work and sweat equity that goes into making a thing and every single day when i come in it's my job to validate that entire process i don't know

83:28 Stephan Hawkes Other than, you know, I mean, I don't know a lot of jobs where it's that level of gratification is even possible in a creative field. It's very, I don't know, I'd probably be open to those jobs. I'd probably be open to other jobs like that, but that's just what's compulsed in me. Those are the things that make me happy. And obviously that's what I want to do because that's literally what I'm doing.

83:57 Stephan Hawkes So you just take a bunch of people's compulsions you use your compulsion and then we're all just compulse to make the Yeah. best thing we can make It's pretty good feeling man.

84:05 Stephan Hawkes I have hanging out with killer dudes who all like music for some similar reason that you do sending off files and emails and getting fucking high five emails back it's there's a lot worse ways to live a life i'm quite sure there are more lucrative ways to live a life uh for some people i'm sure i could be doing this in a way probably that made me more money if i was concerned with with that ultimately uh not that i'm not concerned with it to any degree but

84:31 Stephan Hawkes i don't i'm not really i've never really been willing to just do things that that i don't want that aren't me to do it or do things that are disingenuous to do it i'd rather be a very happy fulfilled person getting those emails and making high fives instead of being like yeah i'm the guy who told everybody you had to do this and this and this to mix a record and it was easy and now i've got you know millions of dollars it's like again

84:58 Stephan Hawkes I don't knock the hustle and there's lots of good information out there from that stuff that I've gotten. So that was what they were compulsed to do. So for them, maybe the music wasn't really the passion. It was the vehicle for the other thing. Great. We're all compulsed to do different things. So I don't knock anybody for taking a different path.

85:19 Stephan Hawkes But at the end of the day, if I wanted to be doing something else, I probably would have I'd probably be doing something else. I just seem to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again and really enjoying myself. So, yeah,

85:34 Stephan Hawkes I guess it's just based in familiarity and just the passion for it is the rewards of the thing itself at the end of the day.

85:41 Luke F. Walton Great answer. So where can people get in touch with you? Where can they hire you?

85:44 Stephan Hawkes Yeah, you know, so I have my website, stefanhawks.com. There's an inquiry thing on there and a bunch of, you know, you know. blur probably blurbs on there that's not a whole hell of a lot a lot like whatever i just told you stefanhawks.com it's stefanhawks at instagram on instagram and tiktok it's not a common name so i was able to get you know stefan

86:03 Luke F. Walton Okay.

86:04 Stephan Hawkes hawks at gmail for instance uh i was able to get them all so uh because my name is is uh not common and you know i'm a computer savvy guy so i made sure to hop on some of those early but they still some of them i didn't and they weren't taken

86:18 Stephan Hawkes um so yeah basically that and and just and it really is anything audio related it's just anything it's like whatever just whatever there's no no part of the thing i can't do and don't do on a regular basis it doesn't have to all be if you're having a problem you're just making an album that you love and you want somebody to put a love and touch on it in whatever way you need um

86:42 Stephan Hawkes i will i won't stop until i do that i just won't i mean historically i just never have so i don't think i'm going to start with you you know it's like i would think about that what if you do just give up like trying super hard to like it's like yeah i don't know man it's like yeah i i don't know i don't know how

86:58 Luke F. Walton Really appreciate you hopping on. This is a great conversation. No reason we can't do it again.

87:03 Stephan Hawkes yeah it'd be great man