IF you want to master records by the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Metallica and Green Day - listen to a helluva lot of music, and from a wide range of genres.
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That's the advice from US producer and sound engineer, Andrew Scheps, a man who has worked with the aforementioned superstars.
Scheps is in Newcastle this week to deliver seminars about music production and engineering at the Newcastle TAFE Tighes Hill campus. The first workshop on Wednesday evening involved the technical side of production, while Saturday's seminar will explore the philosophy of music mixing.
According to Scheps being a great listener is the key to music production. Not just listening to the music, but to the musicians making it.
"You need to have some sort of technical ability, but you can learn the tools very easily," Scheps said. "The real thing is you need to listen and identify the things you wanna change and why you'd want to change them and from there you apply the technical stuff to change them.
"Especially being a producer, 90 per cent of it is people skills. It's the ability to get people to give their best performance and understand why you might want something different.
"It's a super psychological job in a very weird situation because people are very vulnerable when they're performing. So handling people is a huge part of the job."
Scheps' resume makes impressive reading. Beyonce, Jay Z, Justin Timberlake, Lana Del Ray, The Hives, Ziggy Marley, Black Sabbath, Hozier, Weezer, Audioslave and many more. He's also won Grammys for his mixing on Stadium Arcadium (RHCP), 21 (Adele) and Fly Rasta (Ziggy Marley).
Despite working with some of biggest names in music, the Los Angeles resident said working with an unknown independent artist can be just as demanding.
"There's always a pressure, but every project has that pressure in different ways," he said. "If you get a record label that's spent a bunch of money they usually have very definite ideas and are focusing on one song and the rest of the album is made with the artist and how you want to do it.
"If you're with an independent artist, who's just starting out and they're spending their life savings, sometimes there's more jeopardy in that."
Can great production make an ordinary track good, and similarly, can poor mixing ruin an excellent song? Scheps is a believer that the song is king.
"You've got people who are going to like a song no matter what and people who are gonna hate a song no matter what," he said.
"Where the production and the mixing comes into play is with all the people who might be on the fence. The better the record is and how it grabs them sonically, the more chance you have of converting them."
