An Interview with Travis Ference

1:40 Travis Ference Oh

1:40 Luke F. Walton What's good, everybody? Welcome back to Love Music More. I'm joined with Travis. We're going to be talking about an incredible musical journey, a crazy last year, and Grammy nominations and all of that industry insider information that you'll be able to give our listeners. How's it going, Travis?

1:56 Travis Ference How's it going good to be here

1:58 Luke F. Walton So one of the things I was watching and listening to before we got started was Progression, Success in the Music Industry podcast. And I think that's a really fun place to kind of start.

2:08 Luke F. Walton start is looking at what your content creator kind of journey has been the things that you've found most interesting or resonating with your audience and then maybe kind of grab a few of the greatest hits so we can just start off this conversation here

2:21 Travis Ference Yeah, totally. So my podcast, I started in 2020, like most of society did. I just forgot to stop.

2:30 Travis Ference But it kind of came from this place of being in LA for like at that time like 15 16 years and not feeling like I got where I wanted to be I was like really frustrated and had like a lot of like pure I don't want to envy like I was making my living working in recording studios so it's not like life like wasn't bad

2:55 Travis Ference I just had a different picture of what I thought my life would be and I really started thinking about that kind of stuff and looked around at a lot of my friends and I was like everybody kind of feels this way everybody's like why don't I have the hit that I thought I was going to have or why don't I make the records I thought I was going to make and so I really started thinking about like what success means and I was probably you know I was like mid 30s at the time and like you know

3:22 Travis Ference getting ready for marriage and it's like a million you know if you're in if you're listening and you're in that part of your life you know what i'm talking about like everything is like you're just flipping everything over to see if it can be better or if it needs to be changed and so i just started interviewing people and the big

3:38 Travis Ference The big point was to ask them how they define success and if they've ever decided to change what that means.

3:45 Travis Ference Like is when you were a kid was success standing on the Grammy stage and now it's spending time with my wife and kids and not even doing music professionally, you know, so there's just like such a wide gamut of things that success can be. And so that's kind of where it started and then it's turned turned into.

4:05 Travis Ference it's more of a video focused podcast but still anchoring on those same themes of more about your career and how to feel good about making music and a little bit less about how to set the compressor for the perfect vocal sound because we've got enough of that content right we don't need any more of that um but yeah so that's kind of the story of where it came from and um it's kind of my creative outlet at this point

4:30 Luke F. Walton Hmm That's really interesting to hear. And I love kind of hearing that from people in music finding alternative kind of ways of expressing themselves and being creative where you think, oh, it's music all the time, music all the time. And it's kind of like, yeah, at a certain point, you want to have more going on. You're a more diverse person than just that.

4:50 Travis Ference And I found that I was excited to learn new stuff like, well, you know, as soon as it became a video thing, there was even more learning. First, it was.

4:57 Travis Ference how do you do an audio podcast how do you do an interview how do you not black out in the middle of a conversation but now it's like how do I do lights how can I get a better lens how can I do this edit how can I learn these graphics I just wanted to learn new stuff not that there wasn't things to learn musically I mean I could go back to practicing guitar but just like the the newness of it made me really excited so

5:19 Travis Ference Um, yeah, it just energizes me a lot. It's a lot of time as you know,

5:23 Luke F. Walton yeah

5:24 Travis Ference I'm sure

5:24 Luke F. Walton yeah

5:24 Travis Ference but

5:25 Luke F. Walton yes totally

5:25 Travis Ference it's a lot of fun.

5:26 Luke F. Walton totally and it is interesting also to think about that central question of like what is success how is that defined and it is a moving target not just from the industry side but also just from the personal side as you're you know growing like your wife and kids like that kind of life it shifts your priorities it shifts who you are it's not

5:45 Travis Ference all right and like i think younger people might look at it and be like oh you know you're giving up you're selling out it's like no but you actually do physically and mentally and spiritually change over time and it's not it's not a bad thing it's a good thing

5:57 Travis Ference Yeah, no, totally. And something else, just after I said I wouldn't black out in the middle of the conversation, you, I don't know, I found it like inspiring to pull.

6:09 Travis Ference things from outside music you like i'm a big like business nerd and like reading you know a business book or listening to business podcasts and then like well how does that apply to my mixing business you know because i i think that once you once you find your place in music you can get really complacent especially if you get comfortable right and you're like i'm doing it i'm paying everything i'm doing all the things i need to do you can not stretch yourself so i think it's important to like to have that stretch and even if it's outside

6:39 Travis Ference Music, right? Maybe you don't need to be a better guitar player. I think there's a lot to taking on a hobby that's also kind of

6:46 Luke F. Walton Interesting.

6:47 Travis Ference Totally. And actually, I think that's the guitar part is actually really interesting, too, because there is very much a set of like diminishing returns in most things in music. Like, yes, you might be able to hone a bit of gear or some product knowledge or scales or whatever, transcribe a bunch of things that are like really, really hard.

7:08 Travis Ference But then you get to the gig and they don't want any of that. And it's good because like. it like amplifies your dexterity right but like at a certain point you're kind of you really are kind of hitting that asymptote of like you are a good enough to be able to make music like go make music yeah

7:24 Travis Ference totally it's like the drummer thing where you got the one guy that plays every fill and he does the

7:29 Travis Ference the what does zap a black sheet like in one like reads it down in one take and then you get the other guy that just plays groove and you're like i want this dude over here because his pocket is tight this guy is amazing i want to watch him play but i want to record with that guy yeah

7:43 Travis Ference instagram versus reality kind of yeah totally totally but it's real i mean and not to shame either and also like you can do both and one can inform the other of course but there is like an element of like like get out of the woodshed and just create now like make explore

8:02 Travis Ference Yeah, and we're not the nba we're not like a competitive in that way where somebody gets really good at shooting threes or whatever ball handling and now they're the best in the world they're making millions it's like if you get really good at arpeggios like great you're good at arpeggios

8:16 Luke F. Walton totally.

8:18 Travis Ference exactly looking very modesty I don't love his playing. That's one bit of hate I will throw. But yeah, I do think that the studio world is very much the same, just like you were talking about how there's a lot of content about individual bits of gear.

8:37 Luke F. Walton yeah

8:37 Travis Ference and i think that that is one of those like fake productivity things that you can do i

8:43 Travis Ference totally i think you did you do a post recently about like only using one compressor that was a fab filter only one compressor on an entire set that's

8:52 Travis Ference did i did yes and it ruined the mix uh no a great it wasn't it wasn't the compressors thing but it's like you at first it was i'm going to do this because i'm kind of not bored but it

9:04 Travis Ference Right. sounds like it would be fun i've never actually just tried to use one thing right like okay i'm going to make it a challenge for myself and i did it but i spent most of my time listening to the compressor and like finding the best compressor setting for the thing i was listening to and not listening to the music and like the and it was an artist that i i do a lot of work with and i was just like

9:28 Travis Ference his notes back were something he's like it's not like normal like that his his note was like literally almost something's different and i don't understand and i was like he did it i died i'm sorry so yeah the tools you know the tools aren't everything

9:46 Travis Ference yeah but i think that's a great story because it's almost like the tools can delude you too or like i like to think of that a lot with the fancy really pretty user interfaces the guis graphic

9:56 Travis Ference yeah design sometimes they can really trick you into thinking that this sounds better because it's prettier or it's got like a fun reactive light or animation or something like

10:05 Travis Ference that right yeah or it looks like it's doing a lot but exactly right it's used to soothe and that was that i just kind of made the suits the symbol but um yeah and i like suits but you know

10:16 Travis Ference you one have a of it i hear you those plug-ins that gets a lot of shit these days i found that trying things outside of music made me more comfortable

10:24 Luke F. Walton Okay.

10:25 Travis Ference doing the actual job that i was doing because if you're an artist listening to this and you have like a bunch of songs on your hard drive there's like this fear of being done and as a mixer and an engineer a lot of times uh you you have that but you don't really realize because you're working with other people and eventually it feels like it's them that don't want to finish but really it's also you

10:51 Travis Ference and when I was the soul and became the soul person making something whether that be a podcast or a YouTube video or whatever eventually you learn you have to let go and the amount of the amount of growth from just like this is

11:05 Travis Ference This is what this interview is or this what this post is it's not going to be better than this and I'm going to put this into the world and I'm going to learn from the reaction I think is super valuable for anybody that is making making music it's in I finish mixes faster because now I'm comfortable being like

11:24 Travis Ference this is I've realized the vision let's send it to the artist and we've I did a hard tangent to go backwards but that was something I wanted to bring up that I couldn't remember so yeah

11:33 Travis Ference Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really powerful. something about just letting it go and putting it out there I think can transfer into the thing that you're more you know precious about

11:46 Travis Ference Yeah, I want to kind of pull on the thread a little bit more about like work life balance and thinking about because there's the natural tendency of just if I work more, if I take on more mixes, like then I'll be able to make money, then I'll be successful, then the flywheel will start and then I'll be able to figure that out later.

12:00 Luke F. Walton When do you start figuring out work life balance? Is that something you start with, especially for like a musician world where a lot of it is not defined hours or like a boss in front of you or something?

12:12 Travis Ference Well, I think it's particularly challenging because we all love what we do like it's we're hopefully making a living doing the thing that like energized us when we were kids or

12:23 Travis Ference Yeah, or maybe yeah, yeah. discovered later right and so it's not work you know my wife is always like why are you still working i'm like i'm not working no no no it's i'm finishing the mix and she's like you're working you're why are you still working it's dinner time and i'm like it's a must but um yeah i think just because of that it becomes particularly challenging but i think that you will never

12:47 Travis Ference make work-life balance until you have something else that you want to put an equal amount of energy in and

12:55 Luke F. Walton Okay.

12:55 Travis Ference for me that was when I met my wife and we wanted to start a family and all of a sudden I was like oh I can do I can do both of these things I've just never wanted to do the other thing and

13:06 Travis Ference Yeah. so you let work become everything and then the other thing I found when we had our first child was that

13:14 Travis Ference your um your time is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and you just start working faster and faster but yet for some reason not to a lower quality level there's something about having a kid and losing hours to like being a parent that doesn't affect your quality it only affects your time where

13:33 Travis Ference Isn't it isn't it weird I I there's probably some science i bet can probably do about it because

13:43 Travis Ference that i used to because you can't you can't get distracted you can't go like well maybe i'll check out the new 1176 plug-in for 45 minutes you're like no this plug-in sounds good on this vocal this is great it feels good next moving on to the guitar Um, so yeah, I don't think you can really even understand what balance is until you have something you want to balance.

14:04 Travis Ference And if you don't, there's nothing wrong with that.

14:08 Luke F. Walton yeah i mean that that's a great way to put it too and i think honestly for people that don't have kids that that maybe could put our minds at ease a little bit because you look at that and you go that's a lot of time or that's a lot of energy and you're excited for that part of your future but it remains future um

14:23 Travis Ference Yeah.

14:23 Luke F. Walton that part because you have all these things you want to get get to do or whatever and and you want to maybe like have things done so that the kid could like you know afford baby food

14:36 Travis Ference yeah it's true you kind of i i don't know i i don't want to make this about parenting but

14:40 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

14:41 Travis Ference i i

14:41 Luke F. Walton yeah.

14:41 Travis Ference feel like there you can never be ready like you just have to i mean you can't be irresponsible but you but you can always move the bar of preparation and it's the same thing with making music you can always move the bar you're like the mix is great let's have somebody else mix it see if it sounds better you know it's like

15:01 Luke F. Walton Yes.

15:01 Travis Ference even if money to feed the child for eight weeks let's let's see if we could feed the child for 16 weeks but even though you know it's still nine months before it shows up but um yeah you can always move the bar so i think people should be aware of like you know are you are you procrastinating whatever it is you know uh but i mean yeah obviously there's a level of irresponsibility in like having a child but

15:26 Travis Ference You'll never be ready. but i do like this in terms of the parallels with with mixing and i think mixers are a great node in that journey because like mastering engineer it's already it's already baked like they're putting polish on it they're finishing but really the mixers are the that is the threshold in between we recorded a bunch of stuff and now we have a song that like we want to commercially make available and the mix engineer

15:53 Travis Ference to varying degrees is bridging that gap or helping guide that artist or you know accidentally the manager is saying let's have 15 different mixes and then we'll pick the best one and then it'll be better um because i've seen that happen a lot and

16:07 Travis Ference Oh, i i yeah. just i couldn't think of a worse decision than not making the decision

16:14 Travis Ference No, it's torturous, right? yeah Like, why are we still doing this? yeah I mean, I think you want to get into like the philosophy of like how music is made now, the DAW and the computer is not helping, right? And the fact that nobody, most people can't afford crazy amps and pedals and outboard gear, like all those things that people like capture in the studio because of the tone that they have.

16:43 Travis Ference like the average musician doesn't have those things so now they're using an amp simulator i mean everybody's using amp simulators but the problem is that you can change those knobs all the way up until mastering and when you're in a studio you have to change the knobs on the amp until you hit record and then all the other decisions around that they all inform each other And in this like nothing is permanent world,

17:13 Travis Ference I think sometimes a production can feel like nothing ever informed anything else because everything kept changing.

17:18 Travis Ference You're changing the guitar tone because of what you recorded to the bass and then you're changing the bass because you added a synth bass and then the guitar tone feels weird so you change the guitar tone and it can just be very, I think, I don't know, something about making the decision that I think makes a big difference, a big difference.

17:35 Travis Ference It's funny because when I started doing all of that in the box, my computer was really bad. So I would commit everything all the time because I just didn't have the CPU resources. But it trained me to this day. I commit stuff like crazy where it'll go through like four revisions. I'll have all those files. I could technically pull it back up, but I'm printing.

17:57 Travis Ference I'm making decisions and then I can layer more decisions on top of that if I want to, if I want to change. change the tone more i can but it's changing it from the changed space not the original almost ever so

18:08 Travis Ference Yeah, no, it's totally. like super freeing yeah yeah And as as a mixer now, like I feel like when I started 20 years ago, there

18:16 Luke F. Walton exactly

18:16 Travis Ference was, well, I wasn't mixing records 20 years ago, right, I was getting coffee and cleaning toilets. But I feel like the attitude was give me your raw files because I am going to create with those files.

18:28 Travis Ference and now if somebody sends me the raw files it's just like straight to the email like i cannot work from this because you're in every decision you've ever made is gone and i'm gonna be burnt like yes i can match this but i can tell you the amount of creativity i have left after i recreate your rough mix is going to be very very tiny so let's take this thing to 150 and you rebounce the files

18:55 Travis Ference with all of your decisions and Yep. if something is too reverbed or too distorted or i think i can do something that is is more interesting or is a variation of that then i'll be like hey let me get that raw but it's because of this the amount of work that's done in the computer now that is forever changeable like you gotta the starting point for a mix has to be your final vision um

19:18 Travis Ference Yeah. or you're gonna go down rabbit holes and sometimes you'll win but my experience is that

19:25 Travis Ference you are always going to have some kind of demoitis to the rough mix because something is going to be different no one's going to put their finger on it it's always just going to be different like

19:36 Luke F. Walton Let's talk about that word demo-itis because I don't know if everybody listening has ever heard that before.

19:41 Travis Ference okay so demoitis is you know traditionally at the end of a day of recording you print a rough mix and everybody takes it home right and then you collect these rough mixes and then

19:54 Travis Ference you know everybody's listening to this and listening to how it sounds listening how it sounds and then you get your song mixed and somebody in the band will always be like well the rough from like february 13th i'm like it's december 12th like no one gave me this rough mix for february 13th but the people get attached to hearing something you know there's that that what uh it's a songwriting book

20:20 Travis Ference I can't remember the name of they talk about how like a lot of pop hits you know you might not like it but then you hear it like three four or five times in a week and all of a sudden you're like yeah new Taylor Swift song is really good I didn't like this yesterday why do I like this now and it's that repeated you know you just are so used to hearing it that way so

20:42 Travis Ference Yeah. Demoitis is it's never going to sound better than the demo because you're you're addicted to what the demo sounds like and so every decision you're making in the final is based on what the demo sounded like and that

20:57 Travis Ference is frustrating for some people who are maybe mixing or mastering or whatever uh and but there is also there's something to that right like if the

21:11 Travis Ference Yeah first round of notes i get as a mixer is make it sound more like the rough mix i mean when i said my first mix i always feel like i destroy the rough mix right and

21:21 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

21:21 Travis Ference so then i might have to flip back to this rough mix and it might be like really muddy and unclear and my mix might be crystal clear and like tight and punchy but there's something about that mud that is like magical and so then it's like becomes this okay i need to translate

21:41 Travis Ference what they really love about what I what I don't and that that is that's the challenge of finishing a record if someone is in love with a rock

21:52 Travis Ference Yeah. demo itis That's a good word. And it's also fun to think about like. focal points so when you're mixing it's a lot it's a lot easier we're thinking a lot more of like where are we leading the listener how does somebody approach this song for the first time the demoitis is the exact opposite of like

22:11 Travis Ference we just set levels we printed it you all are super familiar with the song maybe guitarist you love that your guitar is super loud in this but any other rational listener turned out the guitar

22:23 Travis Ference Yes. Actually, sometimes I always try to remember that the worst thing you can do, in my opinion, as a mixer is let the first mix you send out have the vocal too loud.

22:34 Travis Ference Oh, that's yeah a good one. because no one's ever going to let you turn that back down you know and so i'm always like i like to separate and then listen a couple different places and be like vocal might be loud

22:47 Travis Ference I'm going to turn it down a little bit because you got to leave room for someone to say, hey, can you turn the vocal up? Like if I already think the vocals too loud and the singer's like, I need more vocal in the chorus, you're like, oh my God, what are we going to do?

22:57 Travis Ference exactly exactly and they always do that is like that number one note yeah So yeah, don't get demoitis. Don't do it.

23:04 Travis Ference don't do it well i mean what are the ways to not do it is would it be like don't over listen to something that isn't baked would it be uh move faster like sometimes i feel like if like if i'm recording to mix in a much more compressed time period there's just no room to get demos because i'm not going to spam that song yes

23:22 Travis Ference I mean I think I think that that is a good a good point to to work faster but then sometimes you just you might not be working fast you might be saving to finish that that mix but then I mean honestly like as a mixer I shouldn't say this if your song is done and you love how it sounds and you've been saving for six months to pay a mixer

23:43 Travis Ference maybe it's time to ship that thing to mastering instead skip skip mixing because you really like it everybody around you likes it so maybe it's done probably shouldn't say that because i get paid to mix but that's the truth i mean sometimes i feel like there are steps that can be skipped does something always have to go to mastering if like everybody loves it and it's loud enough and does

24:06 Travis Ference Yeah, that's right. the mixer understands all the things i mean no does it have to i mean there's plenty of tracks that go straight from the studio to spotify these days

24:14 Travis Ference you're they get like just talking about chefs like he's he's i'll do it you want the loudness wars right

24:20 Travis Ference yeah exactly yeah an insider joke um but uh yeah so i just think that sometimes maybe you don't need all those steps it sounds good it's if it sounds good it is good

24:34 Travis Ference yeah and i mean there's also a thing about genre in there too of i don't know if you hand certain things to professionals i'd say 80 is the right decision to hand it to the professional but there might be like a 20 of hey i didn't understand how digital clipping worked or like i didn't understand routing but i ended up making a new genre like oops if

24:56 Travis Ference Yeah. they had handed that off maybe they would have sanded off some of those edges and now it doesn't have what made that that in

25:03 Travis Ference so the same i way that like yeah like weird gear in the wrong hands can make incredible things yeah

25:07 Travis Ference i know i i always like i remember the first time somebody hit me like hyper pop and

25:12 Travis Ference right totally yeah they were like hey check this out and i'm like i don't get it and like i always i've always had this fear that like somebody might like send me this huge hyper pop artist and i have to be like i don't know if i can do it like i just I don't know we

25:25 Travis Ference yeah should we should talk about maybe somebody else doing it which is another thing you can talk about it we can talk about is if you're not right for the gig it might be better not to do it yeah

25:34 Travis Ference so for that that was my ultimate thing with uh sync music like sync library music i'm i'm just i'm not meant for it man like i put i put too much of like my dna onto the thing and it just never quite works it just isn't right Right. It's like, it's

25:51 Travis Ference Yeah. just not me. Yeah. It has to be. Original, but not. yeah yeah there's a there's a there's a real skill in it like somebody was gave me the note of we want it to not really have an emotion we want it to have like movement but no real emotion i was like i don't i don't know how to do that i just i've failed and i failed for years and years and years because you know that's where money is but it's a very good point of like at this stage of my career i'm you know

26:24 Travis Ference unless it's a specific thing i ain't gonna do it yes yeah yeah no it is a thing to like and then to to do it in a way that it can be chopped really well and like there's a lot of usability in there like it is

26:35 Travis Ference i could do that i could do that but yeah people that are great at it up totally it's

26:39 Travis Ference the hills yeah it's very uh it can be a very lucrative thing uh but same thing with mixing of like yeah hyper pop is a great example of you just really got to rethink and the only way that i've been able to do is to be be i've been in rooms producing things with people that do only hyper pop and

26:54 Travis Ference okay oh my god it's yeah fun uh yeah yeah i mean i do love not specifically that but i love anything that like really embraces the no rules thing because i you need like some boundaries and some rules to like learn

27:08 Travis Ference Mm hmm. but then eventually like you got to push them out of the way and and just move with what works what feels good yeah

27:15 Travis Ference Rules can also help collaboration, like it's easier to break a rule when you don't have anybody you're accountable to.

27:22 Travis Ference that's true

27:24 Luke F. Walton Sorry to interrupt this very important broadcast. And 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. You click on the dot dot dot on Spotify under there. It says rate show and you go and you click it five stars.

27:41 Luke F. Walton If you could do that for me, that's the best way for the algorithms and all this stuff to share it out with the world.

27:46 Luke F. Walton 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'd really help us out and it helps us you know get the get the word out and spread the love of music so thank you if you're listening on youtube you know what to do like subscribe all that good stuff thank you so much and here's the rest of the episode

28:03 Travis Ference what genres would you be like i don't know if i could or is it certain sonic palettes or like

28:08 Travis Ference um i think for me it is music that i don't actively listen to Yeah, yeah. and it's not like a like or dislike i'm just like i don't listen to a lot of hip-hop and if i do it's not new hip-hop it's like when i was like in middle school like 90s hip-hop

28:28 Travis Ference Yeah. just for the nostalgia of it or like hyper pop but like anything that's like organic and like natural like i got so much of that working in capital studios and

28:40 Travis Ference Yeah, listening to all of that and like i grew up playing guitar and i just love pop music so much there's not a lot of genres like i even will do orchestral like classical like string score stuff like i think

28:52 Travis Ference yeah, that stuff's a lot of fun i've worked in i don't get to do that much of it i have a couple clients that send me stuff every once in a while but But when I was at Capitol, I was always like, you know, you watch all the strings playing like,

29:02 Travis Ference yeah God, that's like so awesome. with Can I can I do movies? I want to do movies, pop music for me. I was always a closet pop head.

29:10 Travis Ference uh with experience at capital do you think about like reverb and rooms and like reverb plugins differently like are you are you reaching for things to try to capture like sound chambers and stuff

29:23 Travis Ference I mean, not, I don't think not really differently than any other people. I mean, there's a few things that like you learn from those orchestral sessions is that it's not about like. miking the violin here like or close i guess for audio listeners it's

29:37 Travis Ference Yeah. about the air around those instruments or like french horn for example the majority of french horn is mic'd not like you know if you you think about playing a trumpet you play into the microphone french horn like wraps behind you and it blows behind you

29:54 Travis Ference most orchestral sessions basically any movie score you ever heard that horn is mic'd from in front of the player up over their head and it's about the sound of the horn in the room not anything about the direct the directness of it so i think those things like whenever i'm handed fake strings or fake horns and stuff like that

30:15 Travis Ference immediately i'm just grabbing some kind of like room try to like glue those things together because i know that it's not about it being bright and in your face it's about like the sum of the parts and it's about the room mics if you were actually recording it and everything else is about like poking the part out like we need a little bit more of the flute melody you push that fader up a little bit more and you pull it back down and also like reverb capital is known for its

30:43 Travis Ference eight uh reverb chambers that are under the parking lot i know uad makes an emulation of that which is really good that's not perfect but it's really good and the thing about those is the way that those chambers particularly those work is it feels like more when it comes to strings because

31:00 Travis Ference Yeah. you put 16 strings into it and just the way it builds up in there it feels like more strings it doesn't feel like strings with long reverb i mean other than those two things i mean i don't think i think about reverb differently than anybody else and there's probably a million people that think everything i just said

31:17 Luke F. Walton I realize that some people might not even know what a reverb chamber is. Can you tell us a little bit about what's

31:22 Travis Ference yeah totally so

31:23 Luke F. Walton underneath that parking lot?

31:25 Travis Ference so you might think of like i think most people know of their reverb pedal or their reverb plug-in right if you four pedals and plug-ins the only way to make reverb was in a room and so

31:38 Travis Ference what a lot of places would do is they would find some closet somewhere in the attic that was like away from everything like shellack it with like glossy like reflective paint or some plaster or something and they would put speakers and microphones in it and then they would pump music into the speaker and it would get picked up by the microphone and it would come back

32:00 Travis Ference to the uh to the board in the studio and you would that was your reverb you had to make your reverb you know essentially like if you wanted a room on your drums you had to put a microphone up you couldn't have dead drums and put a room on like because you didn't have a plug-in you didn't have a box and so until digital reverb you always had these natural chamber reverbs and then you also had the plates and the springs those came along first

32:27 Travis Ference and then i think emt made the first digital i might be wrong on that reverb yeah it's really cool totally it's so it's it's such a fun like we're just gonna stick a speaker and a microphone into a room yeah

32:39 Travis Ference well something that people just don't talk about the air here i did a record with an artist i think it's like 10 11 years ago now named low fang and he was a string player multi-instrumentalist but his like his thing was violin and cello but then he wrote wrote

32:56 Travis Ference they were essentially like you know super leftist center pop songs and we were working in a smaller room at capital and the violin was always pretty close mic'd and it makes it always like a little like squealy and like you hear this the brush of the on the string and so we would go down towards the end of the record to get some air we would go downstairs in the middle of the night because we were always working at night on this record there'd be nobody in studio a capital

33:25 Travis Ference and i would throw up a couple room mics where they would go or just to get the space and then re-amp you know violin parts that we wanted some more space to maybe a blend just to save time and just print like a whole string section through the room re-amp it into the room capture with those microphones record it back in then we go back upstairs to the smaller room and we just had a fader of studio a reverb and we did the same thing with the chambers so that

33:53 Travis Ference We didn't have to worry about somebody downstairs using the reverb chamber. we would just record it the only downside to that is you know you can't change any performances or else you have to re-record it can't do any vocals you know i think that's something that some people do is they'll like go to a studio that has like a plate reverb and tell the engineer let's print the plate and then they'll do their vocal takes and

34:14 Travis Ference Yeah, then tune their vocal and then try to use that emt like i said there's no rules but technically i would say that's a no-no yeah

34:21 Luke F. Walton totally.

34:22 Travis Ference I have a chorus effect with your own reverb, yeah. but you know i mean if it works right Right?

34:26 Travis Ference totally i would probably lean into it just throw a chorus on the reverb There you go. Problem solved. Problem solved.

34:34 Travis Ference yeah it is fun when yeah when artists will send you like i've had artists tell me don't tune the vocals and then they'll send me a completely out of tune double with a tuned lead and it's like okay i'm gonna get creative

34:47 Travis Ference No, that's yeah, that's that's tricky yeah creative constraints and sometimes you just like don't listen to them see if they like it in the mix you know

34:55 Travis Ference Sometimes you've got to fix a couple things here. exactly exactly touch up a little touch up the paint

35:00 Travis Ference I think people don't realize how much a performance can be masked by. the rough mix and then it's like as the mix comes together you realize that like that melody guitar is out of tune and you doubled it with a synth or i guess it's probably more likely maybe your synth was like not quite in tune but your guitar was and then and that starts to come to life when every part has its space and then you know sometimes you have to do some touch-ups or replay a part or whatever but that's fine it's natural

35:29 Travis Ference yeah and that's actually really good point of like just how you're talking about you know like the rough mix with mud you know like all those kind of low frequencies rumbling down there that could block a lot of the ability to like yeah tell is that are these things talking to each other are they working and then when you clear that all up and you look around at that room and you go there's some there's

35:51 Travis Ference low end stuff too like a lot of like you low-end stuff yes yeah know if you have a synth bass and like a really pure synth bass and then you've and you're playing like a p bass with it or

36:01 Travis Ference yeah something like just tune it just tune the p bass right because you have this plug-in perfectly in tune sub bass that's playing along with it that that real bass needs to be tight yeah

36:13 Travis Ference i tune bass often like yeah it can make a big difference because you you listen from the bottom up typically when you're discerning tuning and like i'll listen to a vocal be like why is this so like flat and you're like bass is sharp what

36:29 Travis Ference Yeah. do you think sitting in the whole thing snaps into place there you go little things

36:33 Travis Ference The little things you pick up. I mean, you basically you have to screw everything up a couple times to learn how to do everything. I think that's totally natural.

36:41 Travis Ference that's a good way to put it especially mixing because there's like an infinite number of things that you can screw up and across all of these different genres like experience experience I really get why why experienced mix engineers make the money Yeah.

36:54 Travis Ference What 15% of screw-ups are also awesome Totally. That's also fair. That's

36:57 Luke F. Walton distorted. Let's leave it.

37:00 Travis Ference That's I love fair. it. Yeah. Right. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. like History in what am

37:03 Travis Ference disguise. I hearing? You know, I'm like, oh that's double bust into like some spring reverb like that's cool

37:08 Travis Ference Exactly. Yeah Exactly. I accidentally recorded the talkback. Well, Yeah, there you go.

37:12 Travis Ference there you go, right? Yeah, totally drums through the talkback never you can't beat it and how you have to record it because for some reason it always sounds great

37:21 Travis Ference I know. And I guess if it was. if listeners don't know that the talkback microphone the means to be able to communicate to the musicians and and and from the engineers because we're in these isolated spaces in a traditional studio um

37:32 Travis Ference Yeah, yeah, but yeah sometimes crazy cool effects in the same way that like a iphone whatever limiter or whatever they have on the iphone can sometimes sound really cool yeah

37:41 Travis Ference totally agree uh there was a thing i don't know if it still exists but iphones would sometimes have time compression

37:49 Travis Ference um so like you could import the iphone mic with something else that was professionally recorded and you'd be like what's going on there's like a one period where the iphone just like kind of glitched or dropped a few milliseconds and then you're like this is all broken

38:04 Travis Ference Yeah, yeah. Or I haven't done this, but I know people that have mid-production like, okay, we're going to print the piano.

38:14 Travis Ference down to this Tascam cassette player and that thing ain't playing back at the same speed Oh, so

38:18 Travis Ference yeah. then you print it you get like this like cool tape tone you print it and you just like hand a hard drive to the assistant you're like this needs to be in the same place that it was for the whole song see you in an hour like for people that that don't know the tape's going to play back at different speeds especially like a cassette where there's just no control like a professional tape machine had

38:39 Travis Ference better control but it's still moving too even even expensive machines back in the day so the cool part about tape yeah

38:47 Travis Ference right totally and you get to do cool tape effects too with it i've yeah yet to find anything that can do the like beatles-esque speed up slow down that feels like you really sped up or slowed down tape versus like digital artifacted or even things that claim to do it i've yet to find anything that in the box can feel the same way like

39:09 Travis Ference there is a plug-in um drop it i'm ready turn around look hang yeah on cool sounds good while you're doing that i'll talk about like when i'm 64 of um like wanting to get paul mccartney's voice sounding more youthful like when he wrote the song so they sped up the entire vocal performance slightly i guess actually the whole song they sped the whole thing up right or just pitched up yes

39:31 Travis Ference i do not know the specifics but i don't know if this is what you were talking about but there's

39:35 Travis Ference a plug plays called reels the Yes. audio thing and

39:37 Luke F. Walton Cool.

39:38 Travis Ference has a play stop button that

39:40 Luke F. Walton Cool.

39:40 Travis Ference you can automate and so and i think i just closed it um i think there was a kind of a speed so when you when it's playing back if you hit stop it goes boom and

39:49 Luke F. Walton Cool.

39:50 Travis Ference Nice. Yes. then you can automate that on and off and so then you automate the playback on and um it's

39:55 Travis Ference Sweet. Yes. it's pretty fun to play with it's like it's easier to write that automation in like just with with button clicked into because it's kind of just a vibe so you can just but anyway things

40:07 Travis Ference that's fine i like that that's that I've spent too much time doing but those are also the things where people are like would you

40:12 Travis Ference do yes you know can you take that off and you're like you're i know totally totally

40:16 Travis Ference you're like I stopped everything in the middle of the song don't don't the plight the plight of the mix engineer and it's like you gotta keep trying because every once in a while that'll be the thing that'll make the song so can't hold back

40:28 Travis Ference I definitely, I think, I think there's three stages to Get mixing, it. right? There's, there's when you know nothing and you overdo everything, but you get away with it because you're also working with a bunch of people that they don't know what they want or what is supposed to happen.

40:51 Travis Ference All they know is you know how to work the computer so you can make the vocal doubled without them singing it again. And so you take all these liberties, but it's fine because that's also like the expectation of the client.

41:02 Travis Ference and then you realize then you start interacting with people that don't want that and then you're afraid to take all these liberties and also you ruin a lot of things but that's fine right everything everybody's learning you're you're young and then the next stage is you start to get all these notes like why'd you change this why'd you change that why'd you change this why'd you change that make it sound like the rough make it sound like the rough and then you start doing very little and then it's kind of boring

41:33 Travis Ference It sounds like the rough plus one percent, everybody's happy, nobody's blown away, and then you make it through that stage and then you start to figure out how you can basically deliver something that feels like their rough mix or their demo to them, but then has the liberties and the taste that you were trying to develop when you were younger. And that's like really the tricky zone is how to.

41:58 Travis Ference how do i put myself into this when while 100 respecting the vision that they had like when they hear it back it should sound like their song but

42:09 Luke F. Walton Yes.

42:10 Travis Ference it should also sound like me when i listen to it but they shouldn't be like yo dude this sounds like you no unless you're sending something to chad blake right that's going to come back sounding like chad blake but that's what you paid for but i that's and that third i think a lot of people don't make it to that third base because it's because i think it's challenging to

42:26 Travis Ference to master that and and it takes time to understand what you think like what your taste is right like what what is what is your sound i think i barely know what my own sound is like i think i think i know what it is but i don't know if that's really what it is also like when you're the one doing it you know if you're an artist and you're like this is the strong point of my music and your fans are like

42:49 Travis Ference no no no we like this You're wrong, you know

42:54 Luke F. Walton that's that's the part of taste but also i also think that taste is probably the most important thing right now in music and everything maybe in the entire economy or whatever it's like developing what you think is good and how to defend it or how to like make things go in that direction i think that's probably the number one skill

43:12 Travis Ference i totally agree because everything is gonna kind of be the same pretty

43:18 Luke F. Walton Right.

43:18 Travis Ference soon and we all know why and

43:20 Luke F. Walton Yep.

43:20 Travis Ference we don't need to talk about it

43:21 Luke F. Walton Yeah,

43:21 Travis Ference it's

43:21 Luke F. Walton exactly.

43:22 Travis Ference just like now is the time to like lean more into you now

43:25 Luke F. Walton Yeah, I agree.

43:26 Travis Ference and i don't know if the audience wants that today

43:29 Luke F. Walton Uh-huh.

43:30 Travis Ference but they will when

43:32 Luke F. Walton Yeah, I agree.

43:33 Travis Ference they realize like how generic life is going to become i

43:38 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

43:38 Travis Ference mean they're always going to be lagging behind right the people that are making are always going to be pushing the boundary but eventually humanity will catch up and be like give me the human shit

43:49 Luke F. Walton I don't know if you want to talk about this, but like.

43:51 Travis Ference Your last year has been very human. You were talking about what you've got going on outside right now.

43:57 Luke F. Walton Would you be open to sharing a little bit of kind of what's happened in your life and your experience along with your community?

44:03 Travis Ference Yeah, totally. So like a little bit over a year ago in January, I was supposed to do this podcast and I got this email and they were like, hey, you didn't show up on the Zoom. And I was like, oh, shit.

44:17 Travis Ference i'm sorry i'm like evacuating from altadena because i live in altadena which was affected by the la fires and uh and so um my my wife was pregnant like seven eight-ish months like in that round in that zone uh we had a daughter who was gonna turn three soon and we just left because there was a fire not thinking like oh there's been fires before and um Obviously, it was different than before.

44:48 Travis Ference Our house survived. I'm sitting in it. This is my little corner. I've been mixing records for 20 years and my bed is right there because my studio burnt down and I opted to not rent a space and just.

45:06 Travis Ference I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to work on headphones in various apartments because we weren't able to live in our home until last October. So we were gone for about 10 months.

45:15 Luke F. Walton Wow.

45:16 Travis Ference And just the, yeah, so my 20 years of music equipment, everything gone. A lot of my neighbor, I mean, every property we share a lot line with is gone.

45:33 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

45:33 Travis Ference um we're in an area that's like you know like one street's good one street's gone two houses are gone it's like very spotty like if you go up two blocks north of where i live there's it's it's nothing nothing up there uh so it's like it was i sound a little disconnected i think about it but you know i've been going through a lot of it for a long time so

45:53 Luke F. Walton Totally.

45:54 Travis Ference right now the the garage which was the studio is almost rebuilt we're a few weeks away from

46:00 Travis Ference that being a garage again is so if you've heard people talking or noises the old thin thin windows i mean let's talk about like the positives right the negative everybody the negatives are abundant it's easy to google the internet and find out how awful it was um and if you're not totally familiar with it like mind-blowingly awful aldena 9600 structures gone even people in los angeles are like i don't think they get it and then like if you do the

46:28 Travis Ference the google map and Right. you just see like miles of brown that used to be homes uh so like yeah mind-blowingly horrible but you i have this like i've learned a lot about insurance i've learned a lot about people i've learned a lot about everybody uh and everything stuff that i never wanted to learn

46:50 Travis Ference but now I have that information and somewhere something bad is going to happen and hopefully I can help you know a musician or an engineer with with knowledge now at least I have that from

47:03 Travis Ference Yeah like my career standpoint I learned a lot about what's important in a mix like when I rebuild the studio there's a lot of things I want

47:15 Travis Ference It's not a lot of things I need, basically nothing I need now that I've been mixing on AirPods and a couple pair of headphones. I never bought speakers because we've never been in a space, we have a small house, we've got two kids, never been in a space where I could take over a room.

47:32 Travis Ference Yes. So we were living in temporary housing in apartments and bouncing around and it was just been easier to just have the reference point of a pair of headphones and you know what it worked and I miss the air and I can't wait to have speakers and in an acoustically tuned studio again. If all you have are headphones, you should never feel like you're at a disadvantage for anybody listening because you can keep doing it.

47:58 Travis Ference I think what was hardest for me was those first few months. You don't realize the... the confidence that's tied to like your workflow or

48:09 Luke F. Walton Okay.

48:10 Travis Ference your space you Yeah. know like i knew that we'll go back to having kids as the example right i knew that if my daughter was taking a nap i could go out and get a lot of meaningful work done in two hours because i really everything was so dialed in and i could make decisions very quickly and feel confident about those decisions and

48:29 Travis Ference Yeah. then to have those things taken away then you get to went being way less productive because now I'm worried about like the headphones that I have because I should throw in there that I never really mixed on headphones like I didn't like

48:44 Luke F. Walton Wow.

48:44 Travis Ference it and Yeah. so I didn't even I couldn't even like go and buy a pair of Audio Technica M50s which were the headphones that I had in the studio I had a bunch of those I never mixed on them so like what's what's the difference and then shout out to Steven Slate sent some VSX to people that were affected and I made those work and then

49:02 Travis Ference Olo Audio sent me some headphones and between those Olos and the Slates and the AirPods, I feel like I've gotten a lot of good work done, but it took time to rebuild that confidence again. So that was one of the big takeaways. And then just like more of a just a non-music thing, just like what stuff means.

49:27 Travis Ference F. Yep. you know like it's my childhood guitar is gone i didn't play it a lot anymore um and i got a guitar from fender and i'm not playing it but then there's also like there's no urge to like you know it's like a tool it's object now you know like these headphones are just tools like there were so many memories in the gear because like anybody that is listening to this that has been recording music for like

49:57 Travis Ference five plus years you've accumulated so much shit that you've used one time right but like you can pull that pedal out and be like dude this was so sick on Yeah, this record i did like nine years ago let's do it and so like all of that is gone and and so it's kind of a bummer to think about the records that i made with the things and

50:17 Travis Ference right. not necessarily because now everything i have is just a tool it has no story like you know my microphone has recorded no one my headphones have you know there's no story they haven't been on anybody cool's head you know my faders are whatever you know what it is

50:34 Travis Ference I know what you mean. But yeah, man, it was a trying time. Yeah. I wasn't able to do the podcast. I wasn't able to really like be out in the community. Definitely probably I would imagine lost some clients and some connections just because what was important was we had a child while we were living in an apartment displaced and then moved to another apartment. so that was important raising

51:01 Travis Ference Yeah. a second child and then the next one after that was how are we going to get back in my house i'm going to do anything i possibly can and push every single button for against every person like my sole purpose in life was to get my family back in our house safely and then as soon as there the door was open to start building what we lost like that's it full steam ahead on like hundreds like literally hundreds of hours

51:26 Travis Ference Yeah. spent I know because I ran a timer hundreds of hours spent on recovery stuff and it is what and there are and we're so much better off than so many people there

51:38 Travis Ference Right. are people down my street right now whose house is still standing that have nothing that like no no burn damage to their house but they don't have money to clean their house because their insurance company doesn't believe it needs to be cleaned you know and so yeah so it was a lot i don't i hopefully there was something constructive that somebody could take away from that

51:59 Travis Ference from that that little rant but obviously i'm in a much better place now about Yeah

52:03 Travis Ference it um but it was a tough it was a tough year where you you really walk away thinking like i said about what's important a lot and maybe i think i i said this somewhere on my podcast is that you you don't come out of something like this better like i'm not a better person having gone through this i'm not better than someone else because i survived it you're just different

52:26 Travis Ference You're just not the person that went into it. Yeah. Not better, not worse, just different.

52:32 Luke F. Walton All right. So Travis, this show is called Love Music More and this segment is called Love Music Why. Why do you love music?

52:39 Travis Ference man to me i just i don't know it's marked so many eras of my life and even if it's like music i don't know i'm sure you get this answer all the time too but like things that i listened to in middle school and like when i first came to la in college like those songs always they always bring me back to those times good times bad times i mean we were just talking about the fire and the there's an artist that i've just listened to non-stop i don't know why but like it's like really felt like the right

53:06 Travis Ference theme uh for the last year and so unfortunately i'll probably think about the fire when i'm whenever i hear that artist like years from now but i don't know it helps people get through things i actually didn't i wasn't listening to a lot of music until recently and something about what i went through brought me back to listening to music and not like being obsessed with podcasts all the time and being like in constant learn this and hear this conversation and

53:33 Travis Ference and so i just there's just so much power in it just you know and you see it like with kids they're just they're so um there's no filter right when they hear something they love they just they love it they dance around and and it's amazing and to know that like i can be making music and that it can help people get through something or that it can be a stamp or that it can make their kids dance or whatever it is just the fact that it's such a universal i don't know identifier for parts of your life i think is the thing that i think is

54:03 Travis Ference most powerful for me personally uh

54:06 Luke F. Walton It's beautiful.

54:06 Luke F. Walton So where could people get in touch?

54:09 Travis Ference i mean you can find me on the internet you can search my name Travis Ference um you can listen to the podcast uh on youtube if you search progressions success in the music industry or Travis Ference i might change it right now it's youtube.com slash progressions pod um instagram and stuff T. Ference, I'm not going to spell it. People can find it. I don't think I'm that hard to find. I'm not like famous, but.

54:33 Travis Ference If you type my name and you'll find something

54:36 Luke F. Walton well thank you so much

54:37 Travis Ference Maybe it's looking for maybe it's not but that's the game that you're gonna play

54:40 Travis Ference good luck that All right was great great having this conversation thank Yeah, you

54:44 Travis Ference man. This is a lot of fun. I'm glad we got to do it I'm sorry that I know showed last time I felt really bad it's taking so long to get back to here a year, but we got to do it

54:55 Travis Ference but I'm so glad that we've been able to yeah put it all together That's good. All right, man.

55:00 Travis Ference All right. Till next time. Thanks so much. See ya.