It’s either present in the song, or it’s gone. One golden rule I learned from working with Mike is that if something needs to be turned down, take it out. I learnt a lot about vintage drum machines from working with Mike Dean, who is my mentor and friend. “I can most likely listen to any beat and tell you whether it was derived from Ableton, FL Studio or out of an ASR‑10, MPC or Emu SP‑1200, for instance. “Kanye, Pharrell, Mike Dean, Dr Dre, all the greats, all their drum sounds came from one source,” says Jackson. It’s not just phase for which Jackson has a well‑tuned ear. Monitoring options at Jackson’s home studio include NS10s, Amphion One18s with matching BaseTwo25 subwoofers, and a pair of Tannoy DMT II dual‑concentric speakers. It unites the sounds, as if they are coming from one original source, which was my aim with Pop Smoke’s album, as the material came from different producers, studios, etc.” You’re introducing nice artefacts that are like analogue. Every sampler has a different sound, so you get different coloration, distortion and transients. I run them as inserts in Pro Tools and commit them like they are already mixed. “My associate Sage Skolfield and I ran every sound on Pop Smoke’s album through one of my vintage hardware samplers. “I also often use sampling keyboards as outboard,” Jackson continues. I’m not someone to use many plug‑ins, as I prefer analogue gear most of the time. Once I have the sound I want, I commit it and print the part in the session. I have all my outboard on inserts, so they come up as plug‑ins in my Pro Tools sessions. I have two Antelope Goliath 32‑channel I/Os, one for my SSL console and one for my outboard gear. If something is playing up with phase I correct it immediately, mostly using iZotope RX’s Azimuth. “I have the latter because they’re dual‑concentric and I’m hyper‑sensitive to phase. “I have Pro Tools HD in my studio, as well as an SSL Sigma summing mixer, Amphion BaseTwo25s paired with Two18s, and Tannoy DMT II speakers,” explains Jess Jackson. But first he elaborates on his idiosyncratic viewpoints and methods, which he applies for the most part in his own studio in Los Angeles. How the album came into being, after Bashar Jackson, aka Pop Smoke, was killed on February 19 of this year aged only 20, is an interesting story in itself, on which Jackson touches further. Nothing could be further from the truth: at 39 years old, Jackson is in the prime of his life, and he’s recently mixed and/or co‑produced 32 tracks on one of the biggest albums of 2020, Pop Smoke’s Shoot For The Stars, Aim For The Moon. Reading the above without having seen Jackson, you could be forgiven for assuming he’s been in the business for decades and has long since stopped making cutting‑edge records. But with analogue you achieve imperfection accidentally, and our ears tend to really like that.” Present Imperfect The problem with digital is that you need to go out of your way to achieve imperfection. Essentially you get a pseudo‑stereo acoustic environment that is not perfect. “When you pan things left and right on an analogue desk, they’re not 100‑percent the same, because there are electronic idiosyncrasies inside each channel, and this is going to give you a slightly different sound on the right and on the left. Jackson’s love of analogue is also in part informed by his adherence to the rule of thirds and his quest for imperfection. So I frame things visually, splitting width and depth into three areas.” I see music visually, I don’t hear it with my ears per se. When asked what he means about humans thirds, he replies: “I apply the rule of thirds from photography and painting to mixing records. Speaking is Jess Jackson, who explains that he likes to “analyse the human mind and why it enjoys certain things and not others”. I wouldn’t just put things in stereo and let them live symmetrically in the speakers.” I may use a completely different reverb on the left as on the right, or EQ things differently on one side than on the other, and so on. So I don’t look at my speakers as left and right, I look at them as two independent mono channels. We are programmed not to like perfect symmetry. Mix engineer Jess Jackson turned it into a piece of pop magic. The lead single from Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut album was stitched together from two demos in different keys.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |