Sabotaging the Careers of Your Clients, Best Ways to Ruin a Mix and Make Children Cry, While Surprsingly Finding New and Innovative Ways to Approach Mixing

Recording, Mixing and Producing The Producer's Chair
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#1

Hey gang. I want to know what you guys think the best way to completely ruin a band during the recording process would be. Or just a list, come up with good ways to make them sound like amateurs or worse. Here are some of the things I do in an attempt to destroy their fanbase and open them up to public ridicule. Funny enough, some of these tips that I use to make things sound awful give me new ideas I’d never have come up with any other way that can be cool in moderation in a good mix. Here’s my destructor list.

  1. Hand tune the vocals completely out of key
  2. Boost the 4K on electric guitar
  3. Put a 1/8 note delay on the snare and kick to make the drummer sound like he’s a speed addict by using both the wet and dry signal at equal volumes.
  4. Run the lead vocals through a vocoder.
  5. Use a plugin that emulates tape degradation by way of excessive wow and flutter on cymbals.
  6. Replace the kick with a sample of a fart.
  7. Flange flange flange, on everything.
  8. Use a bunch of chorus on the vocals to make them tin sounding, unintelligible, and brittle.
  9. Use reverb turned up 100% with a ridiculous decay time on acoustic guitars to make them sound like synths.
  10. Run it through a keyboard sound processor that detunes and stutters.
  11. Manually make the drumming terribly out of time.
  12. Detune the guitars.
  13. Use an aggressive hard limiter set to ridiculous levels on background vocals while detuning them.
  14. Brickwall the mix until it reaches zero dynamic range.
  15. Use EQ that makes no logistical sense.
  16. Mix it like a bad sounding Metallica album (…And Justice for All, St. Anger)
  17. Master it like a Metallica album (Death Magnetic)
  18. Re-record parts to sound really sloppy while the band are getting tacos and tell them it’s too late to redo them for better takes.
  19. Hire Lars Ulrich from Metallica as a session drummer and don’t give him a metronome.
  20. Make the guitars mono and pan the drums, bass, and vocals to the side.
  21. Replace the guitar solo with moans from a low budget porno.
  22. Use the snare to trigger a metallic ringy pipe that overtakes the mix everytime it hits.

There’s some of my wisdom from over the years, I’ve successfully destroyed many bands.

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#2

Most of those are great ways to destroy the recording. The best way to destroy the band is to have ringers in the studio to play their parts while they watch. Kind of like watching your girlfriend with another guy.

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Bass with clunk end
#3

The other suggestion that works great if you have a small control room is to cropdust them every time you have them come in to listen to the mix.

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#4

So they’re so stimulated by the smell they can’t listen to the mix? I’ve actually had doing this shit help me a few times. Like when I excessively used flange I found I liked it on one specific part on the hi-hats in a song to add ear candy.

#5

Kind of like Bill Murray in Caddyshack, where he says: “What you do is cut the hamstring. He’ll be pushing everything right. He’ll give up the game.” The noxious odor will break their will to record, and they will forever associate the studio with nausea and nasal distress.
Trust me, in the long run they will thank you for it.

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