I recently had the opportunity to mix a song from scratch on an episode of Nail The Mix. It was a song that I had never mixed and I didn’t have a template for it either!
You can watch my full episode on Nail The Mix.
If you haven’t heard about Nail The Mix, it is an online recording school for rock and metal producers! It’s run by the incredibly talented Joey Sturgis (Asking Alexandria, We Came As Romans, and Of Mice & Men)!
Joey’s mission is to build the next generation of audio professionals.
Joey is from Indiana originally, but moved to Michigan when he was 27. He comes from a family of musicians where everyone either sings, plays guitar, piano, bass, etc. During our interview he told us of his grandfather who played guitar every day until he eventually died at 98 years old. He even played guitar on his last day!
Music is definitely deep in his family’s blood!
Joey never thought that he would be anything in the music industry, in fact when he was really young he was leaning more towards computers and programming. He learned how to program in high school, made his own video games and was thinking of going down that road. As luck would have it, he became interested in combining his two passions which eventually lead him into making plugins.
His experience and background has lead him to a point where he now develops plugins, he’s in the audio education business, and he works with a ton of artists making records (Asking Alexandria, We Came As Romans, and Of Mice & Men to name a few).
At an early age he decided that he wanted to use his skillset in different ways other than just making albums.
During our interview, Joey gave us some insight into how he manages his time. He lives and dies by what’s on his Google Calendar, if it’s not on there, it doesn’t exist. This is some great advice for those of us who have multiple projects going on, or who work a day job and produce at night and on weekends!
He uses a few apps such as Trello for managing tasks and #Slack for communicating with his team.
Speaking of technology, we both agree it has completely democratized the process of recording and mixing and now anyone can make records, which brings everything back to great songs.
The only thing that wins is the songs.
A point worth noting is that now is a great time to really learn all of the techniques associated with working on different genres of music. There’s a lot of people that really focus on one style and they get good at getting that metal kick to click just right, but then when jumping to a country song they quickly realize that they have no idea what you’re doing with the kick drum!
It’s important to expand your pallet and become better with working with music as a whole rather than just metal or whatever your genre of choice is.
Gone are the days where one genre will pay the bills!
I would like to thank Joey for taking the time to chat and giving us some insight into his life. If you haven’t joined Nail The Mix yet, make sure you check out my course!
