An Interview with Andrew Scheps

2:06 Luke F. Walton What's good, everybody? Welcome back to Love Music More. I am Scoobert Doobert, and I'm joined today with Andrew Scheps. Welcome to the podcast.

2:15 Andrew Scheps Hello, thanks for having me.

2:16 Luke F. Walton It's my pleasure. You have been an absolute hero of mine. I've listened to your mixes my entire life growing up, and you have influenced so much about the way I think about music and the way that music should sound. So excited to be chatting. So where are you coming to us from today? A.

2:33 Andrew Scheps I am basically right in the middle of England. There's a thing about England where apparently you can't be more than 65 miles from the coast. I am 65 miles from the coast.

2:44 Luke F. Walton Incredible. Incredible.

2:45 Andrew Scheps And

2:45 Luke F. Walton So I was reading about your journey out to England or is it Wales? Where specifically are you?

2:51 Andrew Scheps no, no, in England.

2:52 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

2:52 Andrew Scheps I think when we first moved over, all of my analog gear went into a studio in Wales and I think that's... I think that's why everybody thinks I live in Wales. I'm close to Wales, but I'm still in England.

3:03 Luke F. Walton What was that like in terms of the pandemic kind of decision to change scenery or just...

3:08 Andrew Scheps It was pre-pandemic,

3:10 Luke F. Walton Pre

3:10 Andrew Scheps actually.

3:11 Luke F. Walton -pandemic.

3:11 Andrew Scheps We live five minutes from where my wife grew up. So it's a part of the world we've spent a huge amount of time. Once our kids went off to college, we were spending more time because I was doing a mix of the master's seminars every summer or every year anyway. And so we would just keep making the trips.

3:27 Andrew Scheps The trips longer and longer and spend some time with her mom and then we got to the point where we decided well let's just make the trip endless basically so it was really organic

3:38 Luke F. Walton I love that. And I also think that it speaks to such an interesting part of your career in terms of the different hats that you've worn, the different places that you've lived, people that you've worked with, all sorts of genres, red hot chili peppers to Adele, winning Grammys. What advice would you have maybe to a younger person that's... that's trying to figure out, you know, what's my path?

3:57 Luke F. Walton What do I do? How do they navigate a career? They want to do music, but they don't exactly know where to start or what kind of genre they're trying to pigeonhole themselves. From your perspective, as somebody, you know, lived all over the world, worked with all sorts of different genres, what kind of advice would you give?

4:11 Andrew Scheps It's hard. I mean, I think that... you know the the new age way to say it would be that you don't choose what you do it chooses you but the important part of that is that you'll try something and you'll feel passionate about it then that's probably at least part of what you should be doing because it's this weird thing it's like playing the lottery where in the back of your mind you think like yeah but

4:41 Andrew Scheps It could all blow up and I'll be super famous and rich and everything will be taken care of. But the reality for 99 point something percent of the people in the industry is it's ridiculously hard work. Everybody else thinks that you don't work and that maybe they shouldn't even bother paying you because you're just having so much fun all the time. But it's really, really hard.

5:02 Andrew Scheps I mean, part of my advice usually when I'm talking to college students is. Make sure that you actually do want to do it, because assume that it's going to be hard work and you're going to be scraping by for a really long time, and then decide, well, would I rather go get a gig that has set hours and that'll pay for me to be able to have this be like my serious hobby, as opposed to my soul-crushing career?

5:31 Luke F. Walton That's so well said. That's so well said. And I know that a lot of people look at this thinking about like, oh, if I just get in the door, become an assistant, you know, or start, you know, start at the bottom up, you know, running, grabbing, grabbing meals, cleaning toilets, work my way up. Do you think that that's still alive after the pandemic?

5:48 Luke F. Walton Like, what do you think of like that kind of pipeline of mentorship? Because I know that everybody has a little bit of a different perspective. I was listening to your podcast, talking to awesome people. people about how assistance for you is very much like you want to see them grow and leave the nest and have their own careers. Do you think that that's still a viable path for folks?

6:06 Andrew Scheps I think it is. I mean, I think it's very different from when I started in kind of mid 80s and going through the 90s where

6:14 Andrew Scheps studios were where people made records basically you know the home studio was just starting in the 90s and now obviously most stuff is being made in home studios and everybody is wearing lots of different hats but that said you can still go help out a buddy who's in a band who's making a record and you'll go from assistant to engineer very quickly but you'll learn stuff so i think that what you learn and how you do it is different now

6:42 Andrew Scheps now because the world is just very different but you it's very hard to just learn it on your own in your room some people do and some people can and they end up being really creative and they're doing stuff in ways that nobody ever would have thought of and if they had worked with other people they probably would never have gone down that path and that's amazing but I think there are more people who will hit a dead end because of just the lack of input even if you're the assistant

7:10 Andrew Scheps and there's still a collaboration there's still a when you're stuck someone will suggest to you like hey man why don't you try this and that'll get you over a hurdle that you might not have been able to get over on your own so if you can find a way to do it i do think it's really important to be working with people who are more experienced than you

7:28 Luke F. Walton I also think there's an element of kind of learning by osmosis in mixing specifically, because it's so there's like 15 different ways you can go and they're all technically right directions. And that that can lead to a lot of decision paralysis or maybe even worse, the constant revision or the self revision, where

7:48 Andrew Scheps Yeah.

7:48 Luke F. Walton you'd never send it to the client, it's actually like mix 15, but they see mix one. Any advice kind of on that end, or maybe how to navigate that?

7:55 Andrew Scheps That if somebody's in the dark. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's easy for me to say how I do it now. And it's hard for me to remember what it was like at the beginning.

8:05 Andrew Scheps But like for mixing specifically, is that you shouldn't have a vision of how you want it to sound because that doesn't make any sense because the source material you've got is going to dictate how it sounds and that you've got to be going after how you want it to feel and when i'm teaching seminars one of the things i really try and focus on it's like okay so just as an example and then i'll come back to the thing that's relevant is all through high school i was a jazz trumpet player and then i wanted to learn how to record so i went to the university of miami you had

8:40 Andrew Scheps you had a four-year program in recording but to do it you had to be a music performance major which is insane because it's a ridiculously good music school so i managed to get in on trumpet i'm not that great but the first day in the first rehearsal of big band everybody was talking about okay how long are we holding these notes are we cutting off on the beat or on the end or whatever and it was a discussion that never happened in high school like

9:08 Andrew Scheps Hmm. What? But never thought about that. The music says where they start, right? And then you, but obviously that completely transforms the way an ensemble is going to play stuff. And so it just completely opened my mind, but it also gave me this perspective. This isn't a great parallel. I just actually wanted to say it out loud. It's not, this is not terribly relevant.

9:29 Andrew Scheps Okay, so back to what I was going to say though, is that if you're focusing on how you want to mix to

9:35 Andrew Scheps to feel it's really easy to get stuck in the middle of sections where the emotion in a song is actually from the transitions between sections it's the feeling you get going from the verse into the chorus and then how you get back down to the verse after the chorus what is the bridge feel like is it a different world is it the broken down world of the chorus and all of that and if you can get an idea of how you want those

10:01 Andrew Scheps those bits to feel when that is right it's just super obvious that you're done and then it's having the ability to just leave it to not say yeah transition in the chorus feels great but man that snare sound like dude part of the reason it works is because the snare sounds the way it does and it doesn't matter what it sounds like like for me the first stage of mixing is I'm prepping a session and while I'm doing it I listen to the rough mix or the session as they left it

10:30 Andrew Scheps And in my head, the checklist is how I want stuff to feel. Either this should feel so much bigger or, oh my God, this feels amazing. I can't lose sight of this.

10:40 Andrew Scheps Yeah. And it's just moments. It could be the way a line in the vocal is just way too loud. But it's so awesome because you hear some physical thing that was going on in their throat.

10:51 Andrew Scheps All that stuff is what's important and what makes people want to listen to stuff again. The Sonics are cool, but it is only in service of that. So if you keep that in mind, it's actually much easier to finish a mix. Well, no, it's much easier to know when it's done. It doesn't make it easier to finish it.

11:12 Luke F. Walton Really, really well said. A few things that I want to point out that I really like. So I had a great conversation with John Stork about serendipity. And I liked your talking about kind of going where you're led and where your passion leads you.

11:24 Luke F. Walton I wanted to ask you as well about workflow automation and the technical side of what you've done as somebody that wears a lot of hats and extends your career and follows where your passion leads and maybe ways that I don't know, I think.

11:38 Luke F. Walton music and technology have merged and they continue to merge heavier and heavier and i i think that's what a lot of people in college are kind of looking at too is like maybe i can make a plug-in company maybe i could think in software do you have any advice through that whole journey of uh because i saw you at the nam show Two years ago, something like that,

11:57 Luke F. Walton I was really struck by your passion for software in addition to music. Just curious on your perspective on

12:04 Andrew Scheps Well, that too. I mean, it's the interface, right? So I say, oh, you need to make a mix feel a certain way. Well, the only way you can do that is by using, if you're mixing in the box, plug-ins. Like, that's it. That's all you've got. You've got level, pan, plug-ins. end of story so they're super important and you want ones that inspire you and

12:27 Andrew Scheps Yes. it doesn't have to be because it's some crazy weird interface it can be like when i did my channel strip with waves what's inspiring about it is it's everything i need most of the time in one window and i move a couple of knobs and it sounds like what i want so if you want to start a plug-in company it's It's all about the ideas.

12:50 Andrew Scheps Like you could with ChatGPT and juice, you can write a plug-in in an afternoon and you don't have to have any idea of what you're doing.

12:57 Andrew Scheps Yes. I've done some amazing programming this morning in Python and I don't know Python.

13:02 Andrew Scheps Awesome. So it Awesome. is, it's all about the ideas. And I have a feeling at some point we're going to talk about AI and then so that will bring us back to some more thoughts about that. But.

13:14 Andrew Scheps Don't start a plug-in company because you think you can do a better 1176 plug-in.

13:19 Andrew Scheps Hmm. There are like 40 of them and I don't think I'm exaggerating and I might be...

13:25 Andrew Scheps counting under like there maybe they're 50 or 60 nobody needs another one of those but you could take that compression topology and put it in an interface that's totally different and make it creative for people and then all of a sudden now you've built a new tool even though under the hood it's not necessarily new so yeah it's the ideas in the same way I think that that parallels very much being an artist

13:52 Andrew Scheps You know, if you can't decide what genre you want to be an artist in, if it's because you love so many genres, well, cool, then just keep poking at them and maybe one will help pay for the others.

14:03 Andrew Scheps Yeah. But if it's because you really just have absolutely no idea, then probably you're not that type of artist. You need to find a band that you like or someone to collaborate with and let them make those decisions. Because like for me as a producer. I don't do it from scratch.

14:19 Andrew Scheps I'm always responding to what other people have done, and I think that's why my discography is so crazy. It's all over the place because I'm reacting to things, and I like stuff in every genre. I hate stuff in every genre as well. Yeah, it's really important to find a reason for making the stuff you're making, whether it's personal or hopefully, you know, because the rest of the world wants it.

14:47 Luke F. Walton All these points that I'm starting to see of talking about cutoff time and trumpet playing and having that influence perspective on mixing and recording and then the idea of not just making a plug-in because it's cool tech, but making it from the perspective of the end user,

15:06 Luke F. Walton the person that's going to be trying to elevate their game or eliminate some amount of churn or BS that they have to do in their day-to-day. I think that that's a great. great mentality that honestly the world needs more of and probably as we get more and more AI that's going to be maybe the number one skill is how can you think of the totality? How can you think more broadly? Yeah.

15:27 Andrew Scheps Yeah. And also, I think, you know, hearing you sort of. um summarize what i've been talking about i think it's also very easy to think like well you can just be messy then Yeah. just like ah it feels great or whatever but that's not true at all

15:41 Luke F. Walton Yes.

15:41 Andrew Scheps if you leave lots of bad edits in your vocal comp you cannot make the song personal it's impossible because you're constantly drawing people out of it because that's not a natural thing their brain will not let that alone they have to listen to it and like what the hell was that

15:56 Andrew Scheps that so there's a lot of very meticulous horrible work that i do in my software and in my plug-in development and in my mixing like it's always there so it's not like it's a shortcut to say your snare doesn't have to sound a certain way but it better sound right and

16:16 Luke F. Walton Yes.

16:17 Andrew Scheps it can't sound right if there's something wrong with something else that steps on it so it's not easy to do that but i think that if you can If you can focus on that, then what you're doing is you separate the tools you're using from the result you get by using the tools. So you're only ever assessing the result. don't assess the tools themselves and the minuscule job that they're doing.

16:38 Andrew Scheps I don't know if that makes sense,

16:39 Luke F. Walton It

16:39 Andrew Scheps but you've

16:39 Luke F. Walton does. It does.

16:40 Andrew Scheps got to zoom out all the time.

16:42 Luke F. Walton And I like that of like zoom in really far to assess like what are the things that are taking me out of this artistic moment, like a weird resonance or bad vocal edits or something like that, so that you can zoom back out and assess the emotional.

16:57 Andrew Scheps And if you zoom out, don't... Don't ever look for problems. Because if

17:03 Luke F. Walton Okay.

17:03 Andrew Scheps you're any good at your job, they'll find you.

17:07 Luke F. Walton Right.

17:07 Andrew Scheps So before I send a mix, I will often have it playing quietly or even on my computer monitor speakers or whatever. And I'll think like, yeah, I think this thing's done. And I'll check email or I'll do whatever while it plays two or three times. And usually something's like, whoa, what the hell was that? And then you're like, oh, okay.

17:24 Andrew Scheps And then you might become actively listening again and realize that that's the tip of some iceberg that you've completely ignored up. word up until now but if you're always zoomed in you're going to miss things because the shape of it will never change you've got to be completely objective about it which is impossible so yeah anyway blah blah blah

17:48 Luke F. Walton No, no, this is really good. That's one of the reasons why I like talking to mix engineers so much is like

17:54 Luke F. Walton There is the push and pull of the artistic and the technical of the commercial and the like procedure and the I want to try something completely different. There's always injection of new technology or the same technology with a different flavor. I'm pretty sure I have five different UAD 1176s just from one company alone.

18:13 Luke F. Walton I think that that intersection is just such a fascinating part of the industry and one that people even on the artist side sometimes feel like. put in tracks get back wow it sounds so much better like we'll fix it in the mix kind of idea uh yeah it's kind of like almost like as mastering is mixing is also its own kind of black box

18:34 Andrew Scheps yeah i mean look if you've got 10 different 1176 plugins well how are you going to choose which one to use you're going to choose you're going to choose the one that feels best to you when you pop it on a track and it could be that it feels better because it looks better like it could be anything

18:51 Andrew Scheps But I can't believe for a second that for every single time you want to use in 1176 you're going to go through all the plug-ins and decide which is the right one for that track. You're just going to pick a favorite because of something or other and that's going to be your go-to.

19:07 Luke F. Walton it's so true and also i think you can get to a similar result through several different paths like

19:13 Andrew Scheps Yeah.

19:14 Luke F. Walton i've talked i've talked to a lot of great mixers who will use stock plugins because they're faster they know them and it'll surprise a lot of people because it's like well you're not using like the fancy toy it's like no like d verb does it whatever

19:25 Andrew Scheps Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. My plug-in folder, I think last time I looked. I've got like 3200 plugins or something absolutely stupid but

19:35 Luke F. Walton Awesome.

19:35 Andrew Scheps it's because people send me stuff to mix there'll be plugins in the session I've never heard of and so I get demos I listen to them and half the time I end up buying them because I need to be able to recreate what they were doing otherwise I'm starting from scratch on something that they already like and blah blah blah so it builds up like crazy I would say way over 95% of the time if I'm putting something on the insert it's gonna be either my omni channel from waves because

20:00 Andrew Scheps because I built it it's got everything in there or it stands out which is stocked with pro tools like that's it five percent of the time I'm looking for something and that's when I'll dive into the other 3198 plugins you know

20:13 Luke F. Walton Yes.

20:13 Andrew Scheps but I would never finish anything if I was worried about what was the right thing to use so I only know if what I'm using is wrong because I can't get it to do the thing I want it to do and you can you always can

20:28 Luke F. Walton What do you think of the kind of newer-ish class of plug-ins like the Reactive stuff, like a Sooth or a Golfoss or a Track Spacer? I see a lot of those on sessions nowadays because they're fast, and I think that's a

20:42 Andrew Scheps Yeah,

20:42 Luke F. Walton lot of what people are tracking and using it. How do you feel about kind of that class of almost AI-adjacent, maybe even Mercury, but like that whole world?

20:52 Andrew Scheps I mean, I think that it's fascinating tech. tech i think with any plug-in there are artifacts to what it does and so sometimes it's like oh there's harmonic distortion you know like every single piece of analog gear ever built has noise and harmonic distortion you're like okay well i like those artifacts that's cool the more kind of monolithic some of the plug-ins get you can't reach inside and turn down the little bit of artifacting that you don't like so like sue is amazing

21:24 Andrew Scheps but if it like won't let go of a certain thing and you can't figure out how to have it keep doing the thing it's unbelievably great at but without destroying the air or whatever it is

21:37 Luke F. Walton Yes.

21:37 Andrew Scheps and i'm just using this example it's not like sooth has an issue that other ones don't then you have you get to the point where you have to make a decision about do i live with the fallout or do i just have to figure out how to do this a different way so So that, again, I'm just going back to the plugins I made because it's easy for me to talk about them.

21:58 Andrew Scheps So the second plugin I did with waves was parallel particles and I wanted it to be super complicated under the hood, which it is. I mean, the audio routing inside that plugin is insane, but it's got four knobs. That's it. You turn it up if you like it. Great. If you don't turn the knob back down. But it does mean that there are more situations where it's like, it's close, but no.

22:21 Andrew Scheps As opposed to then the next one, which is my channel strip, which you have control over absolutely everything. And I tried to make it intuitive and blah, blah, blah. But it still is to the point where you kind of have to know what you're doing, but you'll get exactly what you want. So that's just the tradeoff. And I think that some of these plugins are so powerful, you would never be able to do what they're doing.

22:42 Andrew Scheps And so you would take whatever comes with it. The problem, though. is that like when Auto-Tune first came out you're too young you don't remember this in fact you might be younger than Auto-Tune I don't know it's

22:57 Luke F. Walton I don't know. I don't know.

22:58 Andrew Scheps possible it's possible so when it first came out it was magic it was like you've got to be kidding me this is impossible the separation of pitch to form it in time that was unbelievably nuts so it got used on everything and

23:16 Luke F. Walton Yep.

23:17 Andrew Scheps obviously there was then the share hit and whatever

23:19 Luke F. Walton Yes.

23:19 Andrew Scheps but even with um just minor tuning there was a sound that autotune had but nobody heard it for the first six months because you just couldn't hear it because it was like oh my god and then especially because it was being used everywhere it's like oh right there's this little bit of change up at around 10k there's like some weird weird

23:43 Andrew Scheps weird thing and it wasn't necessarily bad but it was different and it was consistent and obviously now it does not have anything like that going on but the early algorithms for what it was doing And so people started to wonder, like, oh, hold on a second, can I auto-tune this because of the thing that nobody heard for

24:03 Luke F. Walton Yes.

24:03 Andrew Scheps a long, long time? And that's always the scary part to me when there's something that's like, oh my God, one knob and it's fantastic. Like in a year, am I going to listen to four albums I did with it and say, oh.

24:17 Andrew Scheps Because I didn't hear it. So I'm not saying that's the case with any of them, but because of experience, that's my fear with stuff like that. But some of it is unbelievably cool.

24:26 Luke F. Walton I really like that. It almost feels like a drug or something like two years down the line, you're like, oh, yeah, there were side effects. We didn't know.

24:34 Andrew Scheps Yeah, exactly. Oh, my teeth fell out. But, you know.

24:38 Luke F. Walton I mean, it is interesting, too, to think about like almost like a flavor connection or like food and drink kind of can have the same thing where something's really bold, it can mask an off flavor like an IPA or something like that can, you can think it tastes really good, but then on that fourth sip, you're like, what is that?

24:53 Luke F. Walton like buttered popcorn flavor or something that snuck in it's interesting too to think about like the strength of a plug-in or the strength of an audio signal masking some of the unintended consequences yeah

25:06 Andrew Scheps Yeah. And sometimes, you know, those are minor and it's worth it, you

25:09 Luke F. Walton yeah

25:09 Andrew Scheps know, absolutely

25:10 Luke F. Walton yeah

25:10 Andrew Scheps worth it.

25:11 Luke F. Walton i mean it makes me kind of think about noise reduction tape plus tape combination that was really popular i think in the mid to late 70s of using like a noise reducer like harmonic saturator plus tape to try to get back in some of like the high-end top-end information out of analog systems i wonder if there's going to be uniquely kind of novel plug-in chains that try to each mask the other i guess like air or some of the things that people do on the top end might be part of that answer of what's going on

25:41 Andrew Scheps Yeah,

25:41 Luke F. Walton in a modern mix

25:41 Andrew Scheps yeah, it could be. I mean, and sometimes... like apex oral exciters

25:45 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

25:45 Andrew Scheps which maybe

25:45 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

25:46 Andrew Scheps that's part of like what you're thinking about

25:47 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

25:47 Andrew Scheps sometimes it's a great way to get top-end and not because you've messed it up before but it's like if you want high frequencies on a vocal and you just start EQing them in well it might be that there's some weird whistle at the top of the vocal something like whatever something was wrong with the microphone or it might be there's just nothing there but with the apex it's gonna synthesize high frequencies based on what's

26:10 Andrew Scheps and what's going on a little bit below it and so it's much less natural but it's cool and on a dense mix you're going to hear that top end a lot more than you're going to hear a gentle shelf so it's yeah you know and harmonic distortion is your friend let's not talk about analog versus digital at

26:29 Luke F. Walton Yes, no,

26:30 Andrew Scheps all

26:30 Luke F. Walton that sounds good.

26:30 Andrew Scheps okay

26:30 Luke F. Walton Sounds good.

26:31 Andrew Scheps good but harmonic distortion is your friend

26:34 Luke F. Walton I agree. I'm actually, so I was just talking to Craig Bower about the difference between The mix knob versus parallel processing, kind of like the idea of like being additive versus being like destructive. And it's that kind of clicked for me because I was thinking about it from a gain staging perspective.

26:51 Luke F. Walton Like, for example, when I'm doing my guitar pedals, that's where that's how I came to mixing as I started to like all the knobs of guitar pedals. And I said, oh, maybe I could do that across the entire song.

27:01 Luke F. Walton But what really helped click was I had some plugins, I mean, some guitar pedals that that sucked out gain or sucked out tone before the next whenever they turned on it just didn't sound as good even if i cranked up the amp and that's when i started to kind of understand like okay yeah you preserve your volume preserve the order of things and mixing started to make a lot more sense

27:20 Andrew Scheps Yeah.

27:21 Luke F. Walton Curious kind of your take on parallel processing. I know that Backbus, the idea of harmonic distortion, all of these kind of come into the same world. Would love to learn more about your philosophy on it. Mix knob versus parallel processing, grouping.

27:36 Andrew Scheps Well, I mean, you know, mix knob versus parallel,

27:39 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

27:40 Andrew Scheps it's just you have less control with a mix knob because

27:44 Luke F. Walton Okay. Yeah.

27:45 Andrew Scheps you can't. completely changed what the wet is doing without affecting what the dry is doing instead

27:52 Luke F. Walton Okay.

27:52 Andrew Scheps of two

27:52 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

27:52 Andrew Scheps faders technically though there's no real difference but you can be a lot more flexible with the signal routing as well if

27:58 Luke F. Walton Yes.

27:59 Andrew Scheps you because

27:59 Luke F. Walton Yes.

27:59 Andrew Scheps I can have a parallel thing that's five things And that's going to be different than doing 50% through five different plugins.

28:07 Luke F. Walton Right.

28:07 Andrew Scheps It's different audio going through. My thing with parallel compression has always been that if you do serial compression, so on an insert, forget about wet-dry. you're changing the thing, right? I mean, that's

28:23 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

28:23 Andrew Scheps what compression does. It reduces the dynamic range. But if you do it only parallel, you're still reducing the dynamic range, but you're not doing it by turning the loud stuff down. So the parallel, you're turning the loud stuff down and usually more than you would on the insert, and then you put a little bit of that back in.

28:41 Andrew Scheps And it's not exactly true, but it's basically like it takes the quiet stuff and makes it louder, and that's why you have less dynamic range, which is, and dynamic range has this like, oh my god, you need as much of it as possible, and that's absolutely not true.

28:53 Luke F. Walton Yes.

28:53 Andrew Scheps You're always trying to reduce the dynamic range of things, otherwise they would not have invented compressors. So that's the point. And I find that, especially on things like vocals or acoustic guitars, things where there are a lot of internal dynamics. That if you still have the uncompressed version making it to your mix bus, the emotional attachment to that performance is still there.

29:20 Luke F. Walton Oh.

29:21 Andrew Scheps And then you can crush it by bringing the other stuff in, then you can crush it by bringing the other stuff in but it doesn't affect it in the same way but then sometimes I just want to destroy something with a compressor and so that will happen but for subtle dynamic range control I find that the parallel stuff just works better for me that said I used to use tons of it and now there's almost none my template is set up now that there's none

29:24 Andrew Scheps but it doesn't affect it in the same way. But then sometimes I just want to destroy something with a compressor, and so that will happen. But for subtle dynamic range control,

29:47 Andrew Scheps at the beginning and I have to go get the VCA and turn it up and I forget a lot of times now so I'm using a lot less than I used to

29:57 Luke F. Walton Interesting. Fascinating.

30:02 Luke F. Walton This very important broadcast.

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30:18 Luke F. Walton If you could do that for me, that's the best way for the algorithms, all this 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.

30:27 Luke F. Walton three dots and a five star would really help us out and helps us you know get the get the word out and spread the love of music so thank you if you're listening on youtube you know what to do like subscribe all that good stuff thank you so much and here's the rest of the episode curious with with adele for example i know that sometimes i think mix engineers can either overdo it or underdo it for something that's like that intimate performance oriented i know that i've fallen into the trap with really good singer

30:53 Luke F. Walton under do things because it just already sounds good any advice on kind of mixing something that is intimate that is so vocally oriented kind of finding that balance in between over and under doing it okay

31:06 Andrew Scheps Well, I mean, in that way, Adele is a bad example because I did almost

31:10 Luke F. Walton cool

31:10 Andrew Scheps nothing. It's just balanced and it took me forever to get the balance. but i think there's one mixer it's just there are five eqs and

31:19 Luke F. Walton Cool.

31:20 Andrew Scheps that's it Awesome. and there's nothing on the mix bus there's nothing i mean it's very well recorded it's a great band she's a fantastic singer so you know you've got good material to work with but

31:30 Luke F. Walton Yes.

31:31 Andrew Scheps definitely even on the ones where i was doing more there is zero compression on her voice there's only parallel compression because

31:38 Luke F. Walton Cool.

31:39 Andrew Scheps you start to now in the choruses I mean she's loud it doesn't matter you could compress it and it would be fine but when she's singing delicately she has the control where if you start getting rid of the nuance then you disconnect so

31:55 Luke F. Walton Hmm.

31:55 Andrew Scheps it was important to keep that and so that's why the parallel stuff works so it could still sound mixed and it's not like I put up some faders but

32:04 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

32:04 Andrew Scheps it it kept her personal delivery which is that's the whole point you

32:12 Luke F. Walton Right.

32:12 Andrew Scheps know of the entire record that's the point and it's also why i love uh that cover of love song the little bossa nova at the end of the record because she's quiet the whole way through like she's an amazing belter but you can imagine mixing like if you're mixing loud it's just brutal whereas that track like i love mixing quiet songs absolutely love it It's great.

32:35 Luke F. Walton It is so, so rare to have songs that live in a certain dynamic range and then you can just kind of have that sweet spot. That is a beautiful thing. And I think that the people on the other side can really feel that too.

32:47 Luke F. Walton I also want to talk to you about kind of the little worlds that mixing can create because I've listened to a lot of your mixes on headphones and I find that really, really fun because you will take me on some journeys where you will throw something like maybe hard in the left ear and leave the right a little open. It'll open for a while until you have that moment that now everybody starts to arrive.

33:07 Luke F. Walton I don't know. I think a lot of mix engineers sometimes focus so much on getting the left-right balance that they miss out on some magic moments. I've never felt that from you. Curious your take on like panning, world building, reverb, and kind of that side.

33:20 Andrew Scheps Yeah. The left-right thing, if it's a band, then

33:27 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

33:27 Andrew Scheps I always want to know who the players are.

33:31 Luke F. Walton Okay.

33:33 Andrew Scheps and they're going to be in one spot for

33:36 Luke F. Walton Cool.

33:36 Andrew Scheps the whole song now it might be that it's actually five different guitar tracks that are the left guitar players stuff throughout the song like it's not as simple as that and it's certainly not only for live performance songs this is in general obviously once you get away from it being performances on instruments then that all goes out the window and then it's much more of a musical arrangement thing but that's why like if you start a song

34:00 Andrew Scheps Let's say you've got two people playing acoustic guitar, but the song starts with just one all the way through the end of the first verse or something like that I don't want the guy who comes in in the re-intro to be like, whoa, who the hell is that?

34:13 Luke F. Walton Yes.

34:13 Andrew Scheps So in the intro, maybe even before they play, if there's a little bit of noise or a chair squeak, I will absolutely leave that in. Because now you know that somebody's there.

34:26 Luke F. Walton Yes.

34:26 Andrew Scheps They just haven't started playing yet. And so in that environment, I'm very much setting up a world of the musicians. And then on top of that, there can be a... be a bunch of surreal stuff that has nothing to do with it but I was talking to somebody about this very recently and someone had described kind of the world mixes live in as a sort of hyper reality and

34:47 Luke F. Walton Okay.

34:48 Andrew Scheps I feel like I don't feel like it's hyper reality because that implies something that doesn't exist whereas I'm making something that couldn't possibly exist in nature but it is where you live while you listen to the song and as you say that can change It can go from bone dry to having lots of effects or whatever.

35:07 Andrew Scheps And I think changing vocal effects throughout a song. There's the classic David Bowie thing where like every line has a different effect on it and stuff. And that's an amazing technique. But it can also just be the difference between verse and chorus. It can be something more subtle than that where you're just forcing the listener to re-pay attention to the lyrics.

35:30 Andrew Scheps because it goes bone dry for one word and then but the effects that were on before that were subtle but it's the just like we're talking about transitions between sections it's the changes either on a specific instrument or by bringing in something that sounds like it's nowhere near anything else and sometimes it's just cool because you want to delay on something and sometimes it's on purpose that the bridge everything is a little bit wetter than it is in the rest of the song

35:57 Andrew Scheps the song because you want it to sort of open up so i don't overthink it really but it's very much an on-the-fly building this thing but i like to think that every song just has a world that it lives in or several worlds that happen one after another you know as you go but yeah and so panning is a big part of that especially well stereo and immersive you know where you put stuff that's telling the listeners something about it it's not just

36:25 Andrew Scheps And my meters are moving the same.

36:27 Luke F. Walton Yes, and that's actually a great transition. I would love to talk to you a little bit about immersive audio, Atmos,

36:32 Luke F. Walton kind of where you think it is now. I know that there was there's a little bit of like a hype cycle to it, I think, where everyone was doing it, everyone was getting certified in the beginning. And now I feel like it's slowed down a little bit, but I'm sure that in your world, it's very different than in mine. What's that look like

36:45 Andrew Scheps Not

36:45 Luke F. Walton over there?

36:45 Andrew Scheps really. No,

36:45 Luke F. Walton Okay.

36:46 Andrew Scheps no. I mean, it is a delivery requirement for a lot of labels. Yeah, so you have to do it. But at the same time, there are records that I mix where I say, look, I'd really like to do the Atmos. I want to do the immersive mixes on this because I think it's a great record. I already kind of know what I want to do. And they'll say, yeah, we can't afford it. And I said, well, okay, I'll do it cheaper.

37:10 Andrew Scheps And I can't compete with the rates that some people are giving. I mean, if you can get someone to do an entire 12 song record for less than $1,000.

37:20 Luke F. Walton Wow.

37:20 Andrew Scheps I'm not going to compete with that and maybe that person is super talented and that'll be great so okay so that's one thing about the immersive mixing and it's still happening and it's a real drag is that I don't know how true this is but I would argue that it's much easier to completely screw up a song in immersive than it is in stereo because you can rip it apart in so many other ways and make the groove

37:47 Andrew Scheps To die make the vocal be too exposed or whatever it is And that means that percentage-wise, especially because it's such a new technology, the number of bad immersive mixes is huge, and that makes people not like it.

38:04 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

38:04 Andrew Scheps So that's a battle we're fighting, but it doesn't make money. So why would, I mean, yes, okay, streaming platforms, certainly Apple is paying more money if people stream immersive than in stereo. But. It's not enough where the labels are like, oh, great, now we should get this done properly. So some people are in a position where they can kind of dictate it.

38:27 Andrew Scheps get to do it i am not so there's stuff that i've heard where i really think the stereo mixes were great and compelling and i hear the immersive and it's like not what i would hope it would be but as a format i don't think there is anything better i think the experience if you can get in a room with some speakers it doesn't have to be an amazing setup but just get some sound behind you and if possible get some sound above you

38:56 Andrew Scheps That music listening experience cannot be duplicated in stereo. It just can't. And it's unbelievably great.

39:05 Luke F. Walton Curious where the technology is in terms of like reverbs, delays, like as in platform native applications. Because at least when I was first starting with it, I haven't done a ton since, there wasn't a lot out there, at least at my level that I could afford. It felt all very geared towards video games or post-production rather than music. music production has that ecosystem evolved at all yeah

39:27 Andrew Scheps Yeah, yeah. I mean, there are certainly more plugins than there used to be. And

39:30 Luke F. Walton right

39:30 Andrew Scheps then there are plugins that solve problems like everybody wanted to be able to have dynamics on objects that would be side chained. So like a mix bus, but of course you don't have a mix

39:43 Luke F. Walton bus. that was one of the most frustrating things to me where i was like i can't do this the thing that makes it feel modern or whatever yeah

39:49 Andrew Scheps Exactly. I mean, and I've... I figured out ways around it before this stuff came out and then needing it less than I thought I would. I mean, that's the other thing is that nobody knew how to do this.

39:58 Luke F. Walton Right.

39:59 Andrew Scheps Nobody. It's not like, well, Dolby knew how to do it for music. Nobody knew how to do it. They had the technology, which is amazing. But the difference between doing a movie in Atmos and doing a song in Atmos, they just couldn't be any more different that the only similarity is the tech behind delivering it to the speakers. That's it.

40:20 Luke F. Walton Yes.

40:20 Andrew Scheps So the tools are definitely better. It's built into more DAWs now than it used to be. You know, I mean, now Logic for a while, Pro Tools, it's been in Cubase and Nuendo for a while, or I don't know about Cubase, but certainly Nuendo.

40:35 Andrew Scheps So it's much easier to mess around with, but I think that the thing that's going to make it a format that people care about, and they're already starting to do it, is when consumer electronics companies are making speakers that people can set up easily at home and someone will hear something and be like, wow, and then that will start them actually paying attention to it.

40:57 Andrew Scheps But now, you know, there's so many people listening to immersive mixes on headphones and they don't even know they are. how they are.

41:03 Luke F. Walton Yes, so true. I'm curious, I think that this dovetails somewhat, your relationship with mastering kind of now versus then.

41:12 Luke F. Walton Atmos is also kind of an interesting trend in terms of like Luffs and how you set up a mix versus like a stereo mix where you send it off to the mastering. It's not exactly the same with Atmos, not an expert, you are. But curious, your relationship with mastering over the years, how much you do kind of...

41:30 Luke F. Walton kind of in the mix versus leave for a mastering engineer and then how your perspective is different between immersive versus stereo for like loudness and kind of that end stage

41:41 Andrew Scheps Well, I mean, the easy thing to answer first is that for immersive, like if you're delivering Dolby Atmos mixes, they have to be at a certain level, period. And they're measurements in the renderer. So.

41:54 Andrew Scheps level is not the reason you would use mastering for immersive stuff period i do a hundred percent of everything in the mix and i've never ever made a mix and then a listening copy because that's crazy to me to send something to the band and like yes and then it turns out what's being sent to mastering doesn't sound like that anymore and

42:17 Luke F. Walton Yes, yes.

42:18 Andrew Scheps you can say well it's just limiting but limiting sounds like something

42:22 Luke F. Walton Yes.

42:22 Andrew Scheps It completely changes everything. So I do absolutely everything. And I would say most mastering of my stuff in the last 10 years has been flat transfers. It's just like, this is what it's supposed to be. But I'm weird. And it's not when you're starting out, you need somebody. So the idea of a mastering engineer is that you get a relationship with somebody.

42:48 Andrew Scheps who can have perspective and make sure that it can go out into the world and translate so people can hear what it is you were trying to do. If you're really far away from what you're trying to do, then if you're lucky, there's a master engineer who's like, well, I'll finish your mix for you basically is what's going on.

43:07 Luke F. Walton Yep.

43:07 Andrew Scheps But you want to be getting as close as possible to it. I think that this idea of leaving headroom because you know the master engineer is going to want to want to process well okay fine but leaving stuff for mastering is insane if you know what it is you should do it because that way you know that it's exactly how you want it and mastering is not some magic always makes things better thing you

43:33 Luke F. Walton Yeah, yeah

43:34 Andrew Scheps know the as stuff gets louder the groove changes because it only gets louder by turning down the loud stuff which is kick and snare

43:42 Andrew Scheps changes the way the transients work changes the length of the snare drum which changes the groove so it's not as simple as make it louder it changes the song so if you can do that yourself and do it well you should if you can't then you should have some idea of what you want and then hope to find somebody who hears mixes the same way you do because that's the other thing It's a super creative process.

44:08 Andrew Scheps Once they start doing sonic changes, they're being creative. And if you don't have the same creative vision as a mastering engineer, you're screwed. It's going to come back and you may not even understand what it is and what are you supposed to do at that point?

44:26 Luke F. Walton I loved that answer. I've had so many friends that have. you know basically bootstrapped the mix and the recording so that they could give it to a top name top flight mastering engineer and they get it back and they're disappointed and it's like well i just

44:41 Andrew Scheps They

44:41 Luke F. Walton think it's

44:41 Andrew Scheps could only work with what you give them and you know, you've got the multitrack so you can do anything They've got a stereo mix like it's yeah, it's hard and I, this is like, yeah, I have a lot of friends who are mastering engineers.

44:57 Andrew Scheps I do. And they're great. And some of them are absolutely amazing in what they do. I don't even know how the hell they do it. But at the same time, I don't ever want to rely on somebody else to finish my mix because it is, there's a finishing an album side to mastering. And then there's obviously all the technical metadata file prep, that

45:16 Luke F. Walton Yep,

45:16 Andrew Scheps side of

45:16 Luke F. Walton right.

45:16 Andrew Scheps it. But for individual songs. if they do work on it it's because they're finishing your mix so if you can do more of that yourself then it's more of exactly what your vision is when you're starting out that's much harder it's good to have another pair of ears on it absolutely but as you progress or some people come out of the womb being really good at stuff if you're getting exactly what you want don't

45:45 Andrew Scheps Take it for granted that the mastered version is better. Just make sure that your vision is what's coming out of the speakers.

45:52 Luke F. Walton I love how this wraps back around to the trumpet cutoff ensemble thing with the release, right? It's so easy

46:00 Andrew Scheps Yeah,

46:00 Luke F. Walton to think about the attack. It's so hard to think about the release.

46:04 Andrew Scheps yeah.

46:05 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

46:05 Andrew Scheps Yeah, it's everything. Well, no. I mean, the attack's more important, let's be honest.

46:10 Luke F. Walton Going

46:10 Andrew Scheps But the release is super important too.

46:13 Luke F. Walton back to the beginning, I do want to talk to you about AI and kind of what it looks like and where it's at. I think that we've painted a good picture of how flexible and creative and...

46:24 Luke F. Walton multi-variant maybe is the right word mixing and the creative process is where do you think the room for ai actually exists like where what what is your best case scenario maybe not what ends up happening or what is happening but what's the best case scenario of how it fits in

46:42 Andrew Scheps I think that it's just like when the D88 first came out and the ADAT. All of a sudden, people could do something they couldn't do before. They could make a quality digital recording at home. And you'd argue that there are a bunch of cool records made on four-track cassettes at home, too.

47:00 Luke F. Walton Mm

47:00 Andrew Scheps When the MPC-60 came out, all of a sudden, you could program drums in a super easy way with groove. Tools progress, and they make people be able to be more creative. And that's what AI is doing on one side, is making tools.

47:15 Andrew Scheps that let you do things either easier or even better stuff that you couldn't do at all so there's a very specific example of this is there's a band called low roar that I've been involved in very very heavily for years and years and years and on this last record Ryan the singer songwriter recorded almost all of the songs at a piano playing and singing

47:41 Andrew Scheps Tons of bleed between the two instruments which made it impossible for me to do certain things with either the piano or his voice and Five years ago. I would just would have been stuck Now, using spectral layers, I was able to completely separate the instrument from the bleed. So I could use the bleed of the piano into the vocal mic as kind of an ambient mic for the piano, but it had no vocal in it.

48:08 Andrew Scheps And I could get rid of all the vocal in the piano tracks so that I could do any sort of effects I wanted to do on the vocal without doing those same effects on a ghost of the piano.

48:18 Andrew Scheps Those kinds of tools that allow you to do something that would have been impossible, like, okay, the impossible thing was separate the vocal from the piano in a single microphone recording, but what that enabled is a record that is infinitely better. The record would not be the record it is if I couldn't separate those two things. I would have been fucked.

48:42 Andrew Scheps And it's a super important record to me, and I think it's an amazing record. record and part of it is because the vocal is gigantic and

48:51 Luke F. Walton Cool.

48:51 Andrew Scheps it would not have been able to be that way without it so those tools are insane and they're awesome and you know you alluded to to soothe and some of the stuff that waves is doing and there are a lot of amazing plugins that are listening

49:07 Luke F. Walton Yes.

49:08 Andrew Scheps But, you know, ozone has been doing that, and I don't know how much of the very first iterations of that were AI. I think it was more just profiles and things like that. But as they evolve, they're really good. We're not even going to talk about music creation because that is a completely different use of AI. And I don't want to go into it because it'll...

49:26 Andrew Scheps piss people off what my kind of take on some of it is well no here okay we'll we'll just we'll go into

49:33 Luke F. Walton It's

49:33 Andrew Scheps that

49:33 Luke F. Walton a podcast,

49:34 Andrew Scheps all

49:34 Luke F. Walton yeah.

49:34 Andrew Scheps right so here's here's an example of how i see kind of ai in the world and it is it's dangerous is the wrong word but it has the potential to fuck up everything absolutely everything and part of it is that it will do the work for free but it's not free because of what it does to everything else.

49:54 Andrew Scheps I mean, obviously the running cost of this stuff is insane, but you've completely changed the paradigm of who should get paid for what.

50:05 Luke F. Walton Hmm.

50:05 Andrew Scheps Like the structure of our society is getting ripped apart by this. So put that aside for a minute. So there was a talk I saw about user interfaces for music stuff. And using AI, the person doing the talk had like tried to get it to come up with some ideas for new ways to interact with an instrument, like, you know, not a keyboard and not drum pads, like what are the other ways we could do this?

50:36 Andrew Scheps So unlike like the basement at NAMM, which is full of alternative MIDI controllers, it just spit out a bunch of keyboards and things with drum pads, but like made of wood or something. And like, okay, that's not very creative. And so the thing you learn from that is that it's very hard for an AI inference engine to make a leap.

51:01 Andrew Scheps It's very good at synthesizing a gigantic amount of information and putting things together and making connections you might not make. But it's not necessarily just going to be super creative out of nowhere. Like that's where humans seem to have a thing that it can't do. But. here's the but where everybody gets angry with me and look at your comments is

51:23 Luke F. Walton Well

51:24 Andrew Scheps that at the end of the talk the same person who designs UIs for living was asked well okay so what are your ideas like what are the things you're working on and they didn't really have an answer and it's like well okay that's fair enough because I don't have an answer like I don't it's not like I've thought of a better way to interact with a piano sound than a keyboard

51:45 Andrew Scheps But then what you're telling me is that you are doing exactly the same job that the AI is doing on that specific question. And I think what the drag is going to be on society and on humans is that there are a lot of people doing jobs at a middling level right now that that can be reproduced. with AI. Period.

52:12 Andrew Scheps They can be as good at a job as a lot of the people doing the jobs. And some of the jobs just don't need to be done better than that. Like there isn't some amazingly creative way to do certain things. And in those places we're screwed. But even in creative endeavors, the middle class of that creative endeavor is going to get wiped out.

52:35 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

52:36 Andrew Scheps because the people who are creating music that's like okay and it it would have a small fan base but you know it's not completely new that's exactly the stuff that spotify who are assholes are generating for free which it isn't free because they spend so much money doing it but on paper it's for free because they don't have to pay anybody to play the music and could you argue that

53:02 Andrew Scheps If nobody wants to listen to that person's music anymore because the AI-generated stuff in exactly the same genre is actually more interesting to listen to, like philosophically, that's a huge problem. But in terms of just like the way the world works, would you expect anything different?

53:18 Andrew Scheps And I'm not going to, you know, there's no answer to that, but it's terrifying how good it is at being pretty good at stuff is the short answer.

53:29 Luke F. Walton It's very true. At least we have a little bit of a heads up. It's coming. And it's

53:33 Andrew Scheps Yeah.

53:33 Luke F. Walton kind of already here. But we do have a little bit of a heads up to upscale or change our skills or change our mentality. Because I do think, yeah, there's that top 5% that it I don't know if it ever will reach that just by nature of what it is. Like you're saying it's the inference engine. It's probability based. It's next token prediction. It is not actually intelligent. It just is really good at cosplay.

53:56 Andrew Scheps Now, the one thing, though, that's really interesting,

53:58 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

53:58 Andrew Scheps because I'm a total geek, at the same conference I was at, there was a workshop on putting AI into scripts easily, just using prebuilt engines and stuff like that. But it's the first time I've had a description of why AI hallucinates. And it's awesome. So when an LLM gets some information. It plots it on this, like, I don't know how many axes, but this ridiculous number of axes basically graph.

54:31 Andrew Scheps And so you give it a hundred million things, and it has all these different points on a graph, and that's how come it can tell the picture of a dog from the picture of a cat.

54:42 Andrew Scheps But in between these dots, it has to interpolate, and that's when it gets stuff like horribly, horribly wrong. So that's at the moment where it's like makes shit up and it's like what?

54:58 Andrew Scheps But also at the moment, it can't tell you what it's doing. So nobody really knows what's happening inside. But if you can get it to tell you what it's doing, then you could harness and even create hallucinations and then it is coming up with new stuff. It's not at all what artificial intelligence was supposed to be, but it could be really, really interesting because it would be total chaos. Anyway.

55:21 Luke F. Walton Absolutely. Absolutely. No, it's great. And I do. So the AlphaGo. A experiment that predated all of this stuff was the go player, the best go player at the time was beaten by a machine because it made a move that no one ever predicted because

55:35 Andrew Scheps Yeah.

55:35 Luke F. Walton it was so weird, but it was so optimized to win that it figured out, oh, we'll take a left turn here. So that is exciting. And I guess it comes back to like, what is your definition of creativity at that point? Is it the unexpected? Is it synthesis? Is it something? Something in between, I

55:53 Andrew Scheps Yeah.

55:53 Luke F. Walton don't know.

55:54 Andrew Scheps Yeah, because I mean the synthesis part, that gets to the part that nobody likes what I have to say at all. It's the idea that, you know, what musician on the planet is completely original? The answer is absolutely none. And everything you do is based on copyrighted material that you have listened to.

56:10 Andrew Scheps Yes, there's a difference between feeding all that copyrighted material into an LLM, but at the same time, is there? Yes, there is, but is there? You know.

56:23 Luke F. Walton Yeah No,

56:24 Andrew Scheps So,

56:24 Luke F. Walton I mean, it gets back to is this even how our intelligence to some degree works of like, are we creating these graphs inside of our minds?

56:32 Luke F. Walton Are we basically linear algebra machines too that are decomposing arrays and turning it into high dimensionality, turning it into low dimensionality, doing it all really fast and there's some lost function because we have neurons instead of bits and maybe that lost function is where our magic kind of comes from. I don't know, maybe. I think a lot of it is like having skin and the environment.

56:52 Andrew Scheps But it's the, you know, do robots dream of electric sheep?

56:54 Luke F. Walton Yes.

56:55 Andrew Scheps It's like, well, do they dream?

56:56 Luke F. Walton Yes.

56:56 Andrew Scheps And that's where humans are fucking nuts is we dream all kinds of weird stuff. The philosophy of it and the thought experiments are so great, but the reality of it is actually kind of terrifying.

57:10 Luke F. Walton Yes, exactly.

57:11 Andrew Scheps But the audio tools are awesome.

57:13 Luke F. Walton They're so sick. Yeah. Yep. But I mean, isn't that the human experience, that right there in a nutshell?

57:21 Andrew Scheps Yeah, yeah.

57:21 Luke F. Walton So I can't let you go without asking you the final question I ask this of all of my guests. The show is called Love Music More. The segment is called Love Music Why. Andrew Scheps, why do you love music?

57:33 Andrew Scheps Because there is nothing else that can make me feel the way music does. It's like the raw emotions in a safe space. It's like why people watch horror movies because they can be scared but they know they're not going to die. But it's yeah, I don't know there there is something that it does to me emotionally that nothing else does.

57:54 Luke F. Walton Yes.

57:55 Andrew Scheps End of story.

57:57 Luke F. Walton And look, look where it's taken you.

57:59 Andrew Scheps Yeah, yeah, to the middle of England in the rain.

58:04 Luke F. Walton With a cat on your lap, it's

58:05 Andrew Scheps Yeah,

58:05 Luke F. Walton a,

58:05 Andrew Scheps exactly.

58:06 Luke F. Walton it

58:06 Andrew Scheps I've got squid down here. Mole is somewhere. So yeah, yeah,

58:11 Luke F. Walton was such a pleasure chatting. This is really, really, really, really fun for me and hopefully for the audience as well.

58:17 Andrew Scheps it's fun for me. Absolutely.

58:18 Luke F. Walton So where can people, I don't know, follow you, book you? What's the best way for people

58:25 Andrew Scheps Well,

58:25 Luke F. Walton to go?

58:26 Andrew Scheps I mean to book me. With me, I'm managed by Frank McDonough, who's LA-based. He's fantastic. So yeah, you get in touch with him. He passes stuff on. Follow me. I don't know. It seems like I'm everywhere and nowhere. Like, I don't really post on Instagram. I don't do social media very well at all. But I don't know. I'm around. They can watch this podcast.

58:46 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

58:46 Andrew Scheps You know, it's like that's... That's where I am. And

58:51 Luke F. Walton Okay.

58:51 Andrew Scheps I'll be at NAMM.

58:52 Luke F. Walton NAMM show? Yeah.

58:53 Andrew Scheps Yes.

58:53 Luke F. Walton Maybe we can connect at NAMM show in January. That'd be really fun.

58:56 Andrew Scheps Yeah, I will definitely be there. I already booked the flights.

58:59 Luke F. Walton Perfect.

58:59 Andrew Scheps So,

59:00 Luke F. Walton I look forward to it. Thank you, Andrew.

59:01 Andrew Scheps excellent.