Ivan Corraliza, known professionally as ill Factor, has been producing music for the past 19 years, and has worked with artists such as Matis Yahu, Justin Timberlake, Skylar Grey, Cher, Cody Simpson, Jason Derulo, Jessie J, Calvin Harris, Sia, Kygo, and many, many more.
ill Factor has been involved with music in one form or another since he was a child. His father taught him how to play trombone when he was very young, and he played the trombone all the way through high school. Near the end of high school, ill Factor began to DJ and got into the electronic music production aspect of that. After graduating high school, he began to DJ more and more, playing gigs all around Miami, Florida.
Everything changed when he sought out a mentor and was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of Jimmy Douglas, who was a veteran in the music industry and has worked with a variety of incredible artists, from Aretha Franklin to Justin Timberlake. Through this mentorship, Jimmy shared his network, insights, and knowledge with ill Factor, which helped him create relationships with artists and other industry professionals.
As mentors and connections in the industry were integral to ill Factor’s career, he wanted to be a resource to aspiring artists, DJs, and music producers. To do this, he founded Beat Academy. His goal is to help people embrace their creativity, understand important lessons in building their brand, and provide guidance through the challenges and rewards in the music industry today. Beat Academy provides tutorials, courses, and a supportive community where people can go to learn the skills necessary for them to improve their craft.
Here’s a complete transcript of our conversation!
Warren Huart:
Hi, everybody. Hope you’re doing marvelously well. I’m sitting here with Mr. ill Factor. How are you, my friend?
ill Factor:
Doing well. Excited to be here with you, Warren, and super big fan, so yeah, man. Really, really excited to be here.
Warren Huart:
Me too. Huge fan of yours. Where is here?
ill Factor:
Oh, you’re diving in with the deep philosophical question. Where is here right now? But I’m based out of Miami, Florida.
Warren Huart:
Beautiful.
ill Factor:
And it’s where I’m talking to you from. This is just my studio here in Miami, Florida. I was born and raised here, and yeah, do all my work here, and then just travel when I need to.
Warren Huart:
That’s your own personal room you work out of? Do you have like a vocal booth in there, as well? Or do you find yourself, you’re recording vocals and things in the room with you?
ill Factor:
I’ve been for the past two years, two and a half years or so, probably even more, I’ve been tracking vocals right behind me.
Warren Huart:
Nice.
ill Factor:
And I’ve been loving that vibe. I’ve got the vocal booth and I’m kind of just upset, like all right, it’s got a vocal booth, but I’m doing all the vocals in the past couple years here. A, when I’m working on my own stuff personally, it’s just so much easier for me, just jump right here, get it done, track it. But usually when I’m working with an artist or singer-songwriter, we’ve liked the vibe much better here. Because I don’t know, it’s created such a unique energy between me and the artist, and the writer, that we just couldn’t get with the vocal… Not saying all vocal booths are bad.
Warren Huart:
No, I understand.
ill Factor:
It’s been working fine and it ain’t broke, and I’m not fixing it.
Warren Huart:
There’s a couple of people that take that philosophy quite far, don’t they? I remember George Massenburg, that really built Blackbird, actually was based on that idea about, and he did a video, which I’m sure we can find online, where he’s in a room. This is a normal size control room and the band’s sitting around him, like just in this normal, and he’s recording, and he’s in it. I know lots of people that really are into that. Anyway, give us a little bit of a career sort of highlight. How did you end up getting into this lovely world of music that we’re in?
ill Factor:
I ask myself that every day. I don’t know. Who am I? What is going on with my life? No, you know, it has been nothing short of a blessing, and just to be able to have been making a living off of producing music over the past 19 years or so, and it’s taken shape, it’s taken many different forms. It’s been quite a journey. But super grateful for where it’s led me and where I’m at today from that.
ill Factor:
So, it started off like most people who are watching this channel with a passion for music. I noticed that out of the average amount of friends that I had, I was that one person that was moved in differently when consuming music. I would hear it. And I grew up in a musical household. My dad was in a salsa band, so music was just always around, and I started playing trombone, because I think my dad was trying to just… He didn’t like his trombone player, so he was like, “I need to teach this kid to play trombone.”
Warren Huart:
Nice.
ill Factor:
So, I got in the band, and then just started playing. I played trombone, played piano, and that was all throughout my elementary, middle, and high school years. And then at the end of my high school years, I started DJing, so I got into the electronic music production aspect of that. There was no YouTube at the… Gosh, am I getting there now? There was no YouTube in my time, but yeah, I just didn’t have access to information of how to get started in this, so I just bought a rinky dinky drum machine with whatever money I had, and then just started pursuing into DJing here in the local Miami.
ill Factor:
And I started producing drum and bass, and jungle, and electronic music, but mostly focusing on drum and bass here in the local Miami scene. So, I was doing that out of high school. And then the DJing led into remixing, and then I was working part-time at a Sam Ash Music store locally here, and so I would wake up, go to school, go to college right after high school, go to Sam Ash, work, and then would DJ at night. And so, wash, rinse, repeat, I linked up with Jimmy Douglas, and several other people would come into the store.
Warren Huart:
Wow. Amazing.
ill Factor:
George Noriega and a bunch of other great, talented people, but this is right about like 2001, 2002-ish. Timbaland and his whole camp were moving down here to do a lot of work in Miami at the Hit Factory Criteria Studios, and Jimmy Douglas was mixing a couple stuff. They needed a particular sample CD that I personally just so happened to have. I go, “Hey, if you would just wait one minute.” Came back and I’ll never forget seeing Timbaland, and I knew who he was, but again, my focus was electronic music, and so I wasn’t trying to sell water to a whale here. I wasn’t going to tell him, “Hey, man. I make beats.”
ill Factor:
It was more so like, “This is what I’m doing.” And Jimmy really took an interest to a lot of the electronic stuff, and so did Tim. They were like, “I really like that kind of stuff. We need somebody to do remixes.” So, I started working by just doing remixes and adding extra programming and production to Jimmy Douglas’s mixes. So, he would mix, he would have something on the board and he goes, “Hey, can you add a little ear candy?” Stuff like that. So, I was using whatever drum machines, and Reason Studios, Propellerheads just came out with Reason. I was like, “Oh, this is cool.”
ill Factor:
So, that’s how I got my foot into the game, doing that, and doing the DJing thing on the side, and then one thing led to another, and then it was my turn to step up to the plate when they were asking like… This was actually in Virginia, in Timbaland’s studio in Virginia. Jimmy Douglas was mixing Ginuwine, the artist Ginuwine’s album, and I’m doing what I would normally do. Add a lot of the production ear candy. And then Ginuwine turns to Jimmy and says, “You know, I still have four tracks that I need for this album.” And then Jimmy was like, “Hey, ill. Do you got any tracks?” And I was like, “Give me two hours.” I ran over to the B room, stayed up all night just doing what I can, the next morning I told, “Hey, G.” Or Ginuwine. It’s like, “Here’s what I got.”
ill Factor:
And those were my first produced, titled, accredited production that I got, and the ball got rolling from there.
Warren Huart:
That’s amazing.
ill Factor:
Yeah, that’s led me to producing work on projects such as Matisyahu, then came the FutureSex/LoveSounds project from Justin Timberlake, worked with artists like Jason Derulo. A lot of stuff for the video gaming stuff, too. Created a great partnership with Ubisoft to do stuff for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Kaigo, Sia, those are just some of the few that I’ve been able to work on and privileged to do so.
Warren Huart:
That’s absolutely amazing. What a break. Jimmy Douglas says, “Hey, I’ve got this kid sitting behind me. He can do some tracks for you.” Did you end up with 100% of the production?
ill Factor:
Yeah, I ended up producing it, splitting publishing with Ginuwine. Writing it, because he was just there.
Warren Huart:
Amazing.
ill Factor:
It was me and him working on it and it was great. The crazy thing about that story was I was literally like at my last straw. And when I mean that, it’s like I couldn’t afford even to stay in a hotel or anywhere, and so Jimmy Douglas flew me up to Virginia to work with him on this project, and Timbaland had just finished building the studio. It was a magnificent studio in Norfolk, Virginia. And when we were working on this Ginuwine project, Jimmy gave me the heads up the night before. “Listen, this guy’s coming, and we’re going to need to record vocals, we’re going to do these things.” So, I was like, “Okay, so you’re going to be the one tracking vocals in the B room while I’m mixing this other project.” I was like, “Okay, great.”
ill Factor:
But I had to use this Yamaha huge O2… It was like an O2R. It was this big, digital board. I had no idea how to use it and I was like, “Okay.” So, I stayed up all night learning how to use it, but then I couldn’t find a… And then I was like, “Okay, I need to learn how to use this. I need to prepare for this session tomorrow.” And then I needed to start making some tracks available, because Jimmy did say, “Hey, there’s the potential that he might need some stuff.”
ill Factor:
Needless to say, I slept over in the studio, but I didn’t have anywhere to sleep, so there was this huge keyboard in the room. I took it out and I slept in the keyboard bag, so I kind of zipped myself in the keyboard bag, and I just kind of stayed there. And then the next morning they’re walking around the studio and they enter the B room, they see this kid in this piano bag on the floor and they’re like, “Who is this? What’s going on?” I was like, “No, no, no. I’m not a squatter. I just stayed here all night just working on stuff.” Yeah.
Warren Huart:
That’s amazing.
ill Factor:
Good times.
Warren Huart:
That’s amazing. That’s an interesting thing from a music store, because I actually have a fairly similar story, because I was a musician, touring and stuff, really young, as a teenager and early twenties, but then when I stopped doing that, like very early twenties, I went to work for a music store, and sold recording equipment, because I knew a bit about recording. And somebody comes in one day and says, “Oh, I’ve got a big session and we can’t do it, because we’re going on the road. Will you come and do it, spend two days being an engineer?” And I was like, I’d only ever recorded stuff on my own, so I was like, “Sure, yeah. No problem.”
Warren Huart:
And I remember that day, worked with Andy Jackson, who was Pink Floyd’s, or is still Pink Floyd’s producer and engineer.
ill Factor:
Wow.
Warren Huart:
And that was my first proper recording session. A lot of bluff, a lot of like, “Sure, yeah. No problem. Oh yeah.” It’s like I think that’s-
ill Factor:
Yeah, man.
Warren Huart:
What do we call that? When opportunity strikes, because I’ve had other opportunities in my life where I haven’t necessarily come up to bat and hit it out of the park. It’s just being prepared, isn’t it?
ill Factor:
I think it’s this combination of realizing, it’s having a sober assessment of the expectations and bridging that with the reality. My expectation is I want to work on this project. My reality is I have no clue how to use this thing or it’ll work, and so the farther they are, so I’m like, “Oh, I want to work on this project.” Well, how are you going to get there if you can’t deal with the circumstances of reality? And so, hindsight, I wasn’t thinking like that back then. Back then I was just, “Okay, I’m hungry. What do I got to do to get this thing to work?” And I read the manual, studied it, figured out the signal flow, figured all these things out.
ill Factor:
And so, it really comes down to you know, I want to put in the work, and I might not see the instant gratification from that work right away, but it did bear fruit in the long run, which works out well, and I think I was just grateful for that, man. Grateful for the opportunity. Just work at it, because you’ll never know when the moment arrives, and so that’s really what it is. Just being prepared for that moment.
Warren Huart:
What was the immediate result of this? You got a couple of tracks on a Ginuwine album. Obviously, that doesn’t come up for a few months, so what’s the sort of journey after that?
ill Factor:
So grateful, because Jimmy Douglas, being the mentor, really having me under his wing, just kind of… That ended up being a reassuring and an encouraging thing for me, to know, “Hey, this is where I want to be. This is what I want to do.” And so, it allowed me to build momentum off of that. And for so many people, it really is, the hardest part is just getting the foot in the door. And once you’re there, there’s so many decisions. To be honest with you, there were a lot of wrong decisions that I made selfishly, that I ended up making because I ended up trying to treat people as a stepping stone to get to where I wanted to go, as opposed to sustaining and building relationships, and really understanding the importance of that.
ill Factor:
After that project, I came back home, started working with a couple other local artists and writers, and a lot of urban producers down here, and just started… Because I came with this momentum, it’s like, “Yeah, I want to do this. I want to pursue this.” And so, where do I go from here? And just connecting the dots and things like that, and so that started building that, and then management came along, and through that network, just more work came in, and then the Matisyahu project came out of that, and then that’s all the thing. It’s just compound relational building, that’s what it is. It’s once I’m in this-
Warren Huart:
Which Matisyahu?
ill Factor:
Youth. I wrote, produced Jerusalem, Time of Your Song, Indestructible. My Grammy nomination came from that album. That was the first nomination, and so I was like, “Whoa, that’s awesome.” So, that was really cool from that. It was nominated for best reggae album.
Warren Huart:
Right. I want to hear a little bit about the Justin Timberlake experience, only because I loved that album. It was really kind of fantastic. How did you end up working on that?
ill Factor:
To be honest, on that project, I was more of the bystander of that whole magnificent season. That season of my life was just amazing. So, again, all credit and due is to the mentorship that I had with Jimmy Douglas. So, this was done in Virginia. Jimmy Douglas is mixing. He’s there from day one. Timbaland, Nate Hills, DanjaHandz, and Justin. So, they’re a part of this, and obviously they’re like, “Okay, this is the Rat Pack here.” So, I’m not in those sessions, but then Jimmy was like, “Okay, need you to help me with these things.” I’m like, “All right, great.”
ill Factor:
So, I’m kind of vicariously looking over the fence, like, “What’s going on?” That project was just amazing and just breathtaking, because I’m kind of seeing it unfold as I’m interacting with Jimmy throughout that season. He’s like, “Man, you wouldn’t believe what happened in the session today.” So, I’m getting like the fresh crumbs off the table, and then there’s a song called FutureSex/LoveSounds, so the self-titled one, and Nate and I became really good friends from the beginning. So, I was doing a lot of work with the Timbaland camp and Jimmy, and Nate, and we just got along so well, and he is so amazingly talented at what he’s doing. And we would just connect, and I was like, “Hey man, look. If there’s any way I can be involved in this project.” And it’s like, “Yeah, sure.”
ill Factor:
So, Jimmy was mixing the FutureSex/LoveSounds album, and he’s like, “Hey, do what we normally do,” where he would mix and I would add extra programming to the mix, and then this time, in this one in particular, we were running Justin’s vocal through this Korg Electribe unit that I had, and I was doing a bunch of these tweaked out things, and we were just recording and doing multiple takes of Justin’s vocals running through all this, because they wanted to do some really cool, futuristic type stuff that Jimmy wasn’t doing a lot of automating and proto. Yeah, that’s how I was involved in that. I was just kind of on the side, adding these extra little production whistles, and yeah, and I was just happy to be a part of it, just because of what it was. I was like, “Dude, I’m blessed to even get somebody a cup of coffee for this thing. I’m cool.”
ill Factor:
Yeah, from a distant but yet close by to the project, and it was great, because right after that, went over to London to meet a couple of record label execs and artists. And then started getting some acts and stuff like that from there, like with Daniel Bedingfield, Roisin Murphy, and so it was really, really cool just building momentum off of that project.
Warren Huart:
What do you find yourself doing now? You were talking earlier, probably off camera, we were talking about the process of working with artists, songwriters, singer-songwriters, writing, producing. How now it’s… We do it in our control rooms. Where’s your sort of bread and butter now? Are you doing a bit of everything? You’re mixing stuff for people, you’re producing, you’re co-writing, songwriting, do you feel like that’s really our new job description, to sort of be quite frankly the master of many jobs?
ill Factor:
I think it’s evolved throughout my time, so I like to hit a spotlight on my career as a DJ early on, which then led into producing my own music, which then led to remixing other people’s music.
Warren Huart:
Fantastic.
ill Factor:
Now it’s a perspective I continue to echo in my production, so it’s this ear training that I’ve kind of developed into, so a lot of the remix work became the gateway for me to usher in and wiggle myself into many projects. So, if it wasn’t like, “Hey, can I produce on this or write on this?” It was like, “Well, we’ve got our little camp here. We don’t want anybody in. But we’ll let you remix what we’ve done.” And so, that had kind of planted many seeds into then fast forward to where we’re at now, it’s enabled me to do span over many different types of genres. So, I’ve got the remixing background, where that’s mostly focusing on a lot of the EDM stuff, but then it’s intertwined with a lot of the pop production.
ill Factor:
And just being around a lot of these amazing songwriters and pop producers, I just soaked that in. And so, that became the DNA of who I am today as producing, so a lot of what I’m doing is there’s two real channels. There’s the Beat Academy side, which I’ll talk about later, and then there’s the production. So, I’m still producing for major label artists, and a lot more of independent artists, because the technology has just been so readily available for people to have access to create their music that they’ve always wanted to create at their fingertips. And whether it’s on their phone, or whatever.
ill Factor:
So, I’m getting a huge influx of people like, “Hey, man. I would love to work with you. Independent artist, and here’s my vision, here’s what I like to do.” So, yeah, there’s still a lot of the production, even the writing, and some of the top line I’ll put down. What I probably won’t get into is the lyrical aspect or a lot of the lyric writing, so I’ll usually work with a lot of great writers on that aspect for that.
ill Factor:
And then there’s the other aspect, where I’m investing a lot of my time and energy in, and that’s Beat Academy. And about four years ago, I’ve just had it in my heart to want to create a way where I can, just as Jimmy Douglas and many others had come alongside me and given me the next steps that I’ve needed to take, I wanted to create a platform that allowed me to do that for others. So, I created Beat Academy with the ability to pour into others and provide them resources, a community, and access that allows them to take their next step forward with their music production. And I’m loving it.
Warren Huart:
That’s really a blessing for us, isn’t it? Is being able to give back. It’s huge, but my biggest thing I love is I like the community. I often say to people it’s like we create the playground that we wanted to have as a kid. Because you pointed to this earlier, most of us that work in the industry share one thing in common no matter what country, origin, music style we like, whatever. There’s always just that kind of one odd kid that just liked music just a little bit too much compared with our friends, you know what I mean? We were a little bit more obsessed and we got maybe a little bit more emotionally attached to something, got really moved by something.
Warren Huart:
Everybody else was like, “That’s a pretty good song.” And you’re like, “No.” And now, with this world, with this incredible internet worldwide thing that we’ve got going on, we can connect to so many people like us, because you might be that one in 1,000 person in your town, but times that by the world’s population, and that’s millions of people that we can communicate with. And now we have communities where we don’t feel alone. We’re like, “Oh, wow. There’s somebody who’s in Wisconsin. There’s somebody who’s in Australia.” Wherever it might be, all over the world, that speaks the same language as us.
Warren Huart:
So, you’ve done a course with us.
ill Factor:
I’m excited to do that, too. I didn’t want to create something would just get, “Hey, this is where we ended up.” And it’s the typical approach for a lot of courses, because to be honest with you, it’s kind of hard to recreate on the production side of things. It’s hard to kind of recreate that magic, because a lot of what happens is that spark of inspiration, when you’re side by side with an artist, and then things just happen, and so unless I’m just hitting the record on a camera and capturing the whole thing… Yeah, so what I wanted to do was really go take my time and explain the mindset behind the decisions of why I chose this plugin as opposed to that plugin, or why am I using this EQ as opposed to that one.
ill Factor:
Because I think a lot of that gets missed, and more so it’s like, “Well, this is what I used, so take it or leave it.” That’s how we got to where we’re at.
Warren Huart:
Can you tell us a little bit about the artist and a little bit of the process?
ill Factor:
So, the artist featured in this course is Jared Evan. He’s an artist that I’ve been working with for a very long time. As a matter of fact, for 11 years. The story about this is here’s an artist that immediately got… We got signed directly from Jimmy Iovine himself. We got him signed to Interscope Records. He gets signed. He gets a major record deal. And then about a year later, he gets dropped from the major record deal. It’s a typical story that happens more often now, and in light of that, he was like, “Okay, what do I do? Where do I go from here?” I said, “Well, let’s do this again, but now we have the freedom and liberty to just kind of do what we were doing from the get go, before we got signed anyways.”
ill Factor:
So, we just started training the course, building a fan base, and then he’s been doing really well independently, and so I tap into that in the course, how the nature of the relationship I have with the artist plays a big role in my decision making, in what sounds to use, what style, and what vibes I should go in, in producing the song. So, the course walks you through step by step process of me producing a song with this artist. Top to bottom. So, I cover everything from where the song begins, the spark, the inspiration, even a little bit of the mindset of I know where we’re headed together with the artist.
ill Factor:
And then walking through that, breaking down each of the elements in the track, everything from the drum programming to the sonic landscape of the paths, the synths, the 808s, all the aspect, everything I do in my process of producing a song from top to bottom. The arrangement, the song arrangement, why are we going to the bridge at this section as opposed to another section? And then we also talk about how do we balance that all together. I think one of the biggest problems for me personally when wearing multiple hats, Warren, is I wrote the record with the artist, I’ve produced it, I’ve done all the programming, we export it, give him the demo, and then later on I’m tinkering with it and I find myself down this rabbit hole of mixing it, trying to mix the record myself, and it’s that passing the baton over from producing it, to mixing it, to myself, and still staying true to the demo, but yet surpassing it, but not losing the feel and vibe.
ill Factor:
It’s one of the hardest things to do. We talk about that in the course.
Warren Huart:
Do you find that the demo becomes a production, though? That you take that and realize that you’re just going to keep building on that? Or do you find that you’re doing two separate processes? How do you deal with that?
ill Factor:
Yeah. Lately, what I’ve been doing is, and it’s including in my workflow using Ableton Live. It allows me to just throw the colors over to a blank canvas until we’ve come to a point where that’s it, that’s the vibe, don’t lose this magic. And then I can just start building around that, as opposed to trying to deconstruct from that. So, what I tend to do is once I’ve gotten the magic, the sweet spot, and I have the drums, I might be grouping all my drums together and running them through one bus plugin that’s just making them sounding crazy, like saturation or whatever. Now, the technical side of me when it comes to mixing this woulds be like, “Okay, let’s take this saturation off and let’s mix the kick and snare.”
ill Factor:
But then when I do that, I lose. I lost the magic. I’m like, “Now I’m trying to reinvent the wheel here.” So, now I’m like, “Hey, if I put them in the demo, if I put that on my bus and it sounded great, and the artist was vibing with it, I’m just going to leave it alone.” I might use an EQ to clean things up, but that’s it. Move on to the next thing and kind of build more depth into that. So, that was a hard process for me to really let go of, because I would purposely want to strip things down for the sake of, “Oh, well, I found this out on YouTube, that I should use this EQ and do this and multiband compression.” When the reality is I don’t need to be doing that, it sounded fine, and just move on from there.
Warren Huart:
That resonates with me really strongly. I can’t tell you how many songs I’ve ruined through the years by overthinking, cleaning it up, making it tighter.
ill Factor:
Right.
Warren Huart:
You know, as you’re saying this to me I’m picturing so many instances I’ve done that. And sometimes I’ve been saved and it’s worked out okay. There’s a couple of major records I worked on where I look back at it now and went, “Ooh, I shouldn’t have done that.” But actually, the artist or the song was able to carry past maybe a mistake I made. But then there’s plenty of times when I’ve had a great song and I’ve actually lost it along the way. So, I do think that’s part of our process, isn’t it? We need the failures. I can’t remember who’s quote it is, but there’s a great quote about the only way to grow is to fail. That’s my oversimplification, but I think it’s very true.
ill Factor:
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, there’s a lot of pride involved in that, as well. It’s almost the pride in the sense of I want to be able to strip this down and put the parts back together again and say that I’ve done it. That’s something personally in me that I’ve had to kind of overcome, and it’s a hurdle to me, but at the end of the day, what I realized, the person listening on the other side of the laptop doesn’t even care. The person at the end of the day who’s going to listen to this on Spotify is like, “Oh, you mean you stripped this thing down? You put the kick and snare in separate channels and mixed it?” No, it doesn’t matter.
ill Factor:
So, what I have to get over is myself really defeating the mix, or defeating the end result before I even get started and saying, “Okay. What if… Would it be horrible if I really didn’t have to do much to the drums or the bass and just move on to cleaning maybe the vocal up a little bit?” No, that’s okay. And so, that’s the thing, is wrestling and being okay with, “Yeah, it sounded good.”
Warren Huart:
Do you think working with Jimmy in particular gave you a few aha moments? Because I know I made a record with Augustana. We tried to get the drum sound from music of The Big Pink, because they wanted the band, the band sound. And we struggled with it for weeks, and then I go out to meet Shelly Yakus, who recorded it, and he said, “Well, when [Levon 00:25:59] was singing and playing drums live, we gave up and put all the drums onto track one,” because it was recorded on a four track, “with the lead vocal.”
Warren Huart:
So, I had spent weeks trying to get the magic drum sound that was on one track combined with a lead vocal, and it was like this big aha moment of like, “Yeah, I was probably overthinking this.” You know?
ill Factor:
Yeah, as a matter of fact, that DNA of thought came, 80% of that thought comes from Jimmy Douglas. Because here’s a man who has seen such a wide spectrum of the music industry change. I mean, you go under Tom Dowd, here’s a protégé of Tom Dowd, and then you go into mixing stuff from like Aretha Franklin, and then to Foreigner, and then you go into like finding Timbaland and Missy. What a crazy spectrum, and what a timeline of difference there, and so what I’ve learned from him the most is if you were to sit there, if you were to sit with Jimmy in a session and ask him, “Hey, why are you attenuating at that frequency?” And he’s like, “I don’t know I’m doing that. I’m just turning this knob because it’s sounding good.”
ill Factor:
And you’re like, “Wow.” Because he won’t overthink it. He goes by the feeling that the decisions he’s making produce. And I learned that from him, and it’s something that’s just embedded in the way I perceive, I mix, or just kind of produce even my records. I’m like, “Yeah, this works.” And it’s like, “Oh, but shouldn’t you use this, and side chain that?” I was like, “All that stuff’s cool, but I might be overthinking it, and I might be bringing a sledgehammer when I really just need a scalpel to do this fine little cut.”
Warren Huart:
Bold decision making, as well. Sometimes I find that I’m sitting there doing little cuts and boosts, little cuts and boosts. Where really, just frickin’ turn it up. Trash it out a bit. It’s weird, isn’t it? It’s sort of a combo platter of two different things. Dave Jordan said to me once, he said, “Anybody can turn the knob on. Anybody can do what we’re doing. It’s just knowing when to do it.” It’s just like it’s kind of a catch-22, because I find when I was up and coming, I was EQing everything, like just felt like I had an EQ, I must use it.
ill Factor:
Yeah, that’s it. That’s a whole series right there, man. I’ve got an EQ. I got to use it. And that’s exactly it. That’s I think the trap we all fall into. I mean, because look, it’s cool. It derives… It’s almost bringing purpose into what we’re doing when we’re mixing it, because it would just like, “I didn’t do much. I just put that thing on the master and it worked.” I was like, “Really? Nah.” It’s like, “Yeah.”
ill Factor:
That’s been it, and so a lot of my producing now is kind of… It’s both this mixing and producing at the same time. And I really, I can sum it up with sound design. So, a lot of my production now is grounded with the foundation of sound design. Instead of trying to layer five kick drums to get this one sound together, I’ll just find the one kick drum, and then I just morph these, so there’s a lot of the sound designing that’s going in in the production process that bleeds its way into the final mixing result anyways.
Warren Huart:
Thank you ever so much for this. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.
ill Factor:
No, man. It’s my pleasure. This was really, really cool.
Warren Huart:
We’re going to have links to the course down. It’s really good. Samuel, who I asked to review the course in his own time, I watched it and I asked him to review it, and he did say it was one of his favorite courses. So, in fact-
ill Factor:
Oh, man.
Warren Huart:
He actually said it was his favorite course. I feel like-
ill Factor:
I appreciate that, man.
Warren Huart:
I don’t think I’ve ever said that before, have I? No, okay. I never said it. It’s not one of those things where like, “You’re my favorite son. You’re my favorite son. You’re my favorite son. You’re my favorite son.” No. He’s never said that to me, like it was his favorite course. But he, I think genre wise, you hit the nail on the head for him. It’s exactly what he loves. And thanks for bringing something really fresh and new. It’s a really great song, and you explain it really well. You have a natural… I had said this to you couple of weeks ago. You are a natural audio educator. It’s something that obviously, that you just… Some people just have that ability, and you have that ability to educate, so thank you ever so much for doing that.
ill Factor:
Oh, I appreciate that.
Warren Huart:
Thanks everyone. Please check out the course. Leave a bunch of comments and questions below. Have a marvelous time recording and mixing. We’ll see you all again very soon.