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For over a decade, Sparrow Sound has provided state-of-the-art recording, production, and engineering services for artists from LA’s thriving rock and metal scene. Founded by Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter and producer Josh Gilbert (Spiritbox/Bullet for My Valentine/As I Lay Dying), and Platinum award-winning mixing engineer Joseph McQueen (Kehlani/Howard Jones/Bad Wolves), the Pasadena studio is known for their attention to vocals, somewhat unusual for a genre that has a tendency to drown them out under dense layers of distortion guitar, bass, and drums.
Josh talked to us recently on his day off while on tour with Spiritbox. Read on to find out what inspired Sparrow Sound’s recent upgrades, why the ATC 110s work especially well for rock and metal, how the state of the music industry impacts studio sessions, and what people might be surprised to learn about the metal scene in LA.
Tell us a bit about your studio and the work you do.
My studio partner Joseph and I were in a band together in high school. We couldn't really afford to record at a real studio at the time, so he got a Digidesign Digi 002 interface with Pro Tools and we started figuring out how to record ourselves. Around 2010, we rented a space and started recording demos for local bands in our hometown of Birmingham, Alabama at first, and then in 2013, we moved the studio to Los Angeles and we've been there ever since.
We started out doing mostly rock and metal, because it's always been easy to reach out to bands that I was either touring with, or that I knew people in, to see if they needed work. But Joseph actually worked for Atlantic Records for about seven years, engineering hip-hop and pop sessions, and that was one of the things that actually distinguished us at first. We started taking a more pop approach to vocals, whereas in the metal and rock scene, the vocals were often an afterthought compared to the guitars and drums. We’ve stayed mostly in the rock and metal world, but have also done some really cool pop, country, and hip-hop stuff here and there.
We just worked on a record for a band called Thousand Below that I'm really excited about. There are some other things coming up that we're really excited about as well but can’t talk about yet!
What drew you to the ATC SCM110ASL Pro studio monitors?
My first proper experience with the ATCs was at EastWest Studios, I believe. We were doing a drum session there for a band and the monitors sounded incredible! I had heard them at a few other studios, but that was the time where I really got a chance to blast them and I loved how they sounded.
A lot of times, mid-fields sound terrible at loud volumes in a lot of recording studios. You would think that a million-dollar studio would have nice-sounding rooms, but I think these rooms are not really built for mixing, they're just built to hear what you're engineering. The ATCs at EastWest was my first experience with huge speakers that sounded super clear and where I could actually understand what I was hearing through them.
Our control room is around 20 feet by 30 feet, which is pretty huge, but when it came time for us to upgrade, our biggest concern was something that we'd always had trouble with before, which was, if we got our monitors sounding good in the mix position, it sounded awful for the artist on the couch eight feet behind us. Or if we turned it up loud enough for the artists to hear detail, the speakers were struggling with headroom.
We know it's not healthy to listen at those levels, but it is important to us to be able to get that exciting first listen and playback of the song for the artist. What's so cool about the ATC 110s especially, is that I feel like they have a wide sweet spot. When we had our last set of monitors, I would have to ask the artist to sit right next to me to hear what I was hearing. Now, we don’t really hear a huge difference between the mix position and where the clients are sitting on the couch, which is really cool.
Obviously, the most important thing is how they sound in the mix position, but nowadays especially, we often have just one day on a song to go from demo to a finished mix and sometimes we don't get a chance to revisit it after that. That's definitely more of Joseph’s wheelhouse, because he’s mixing everything. I'm mostly working the production and songwriting side of things, so when we're in there working and I'm picking sounds, and choosing production moves, even though I might not be the last person to touch the mix, I still want the sounds to be close, so that when the artist hears the final mixes, it's close to what we were working with in the room.
It's a long answer, but the thing that blew my mind the most about ATCs is that if you're right in the middle in the mix position, and listening to a mono source – like a snare drum or a voice or something – even though the speakers are in their positions to the side, it sounds like the snare or voice is right in front of your face. It's a dramatically different sort of imaging that I've never really experienced before.
I also really like the impact of transients and things like that; you really are hearing what's going on, which is great because you might overcook something if you're listening on monitors that are not as accurate.
As a bass player, what do you think of the low-end response of the monitors?
It's great! One of the first things I loved was that you wouldn't necessarily need a sub because it's a very realistic low end as opposed to other monitoring situations we’ve had in the past, where you're kind of flying blind with the low end.
Another thing I've noticed is, before, with other monitoring setups, there was a weird hole where the bass and the sub rolled off into the mids and because you're not hearing that very well, you might approach it in your mix in a way that doesn't translate well. I haven't taken a scientific look at why that is, but with the ATCs I just know that it's become quicker for me to nail a tone for bass. It's really nice to be able to trust what's coming out of the monitors.
For me, if a speaker is hyped too much, you don't make your mix exciting enough. But if a speaker is so flat that you're overcooking things to make it sound exciting, that's also a problem.
That hasn't happened with the ATCs. Whatever tone I'm sculpting, once it sounds good to my ears in the room, I can go to my car or listen on AirPods or whatever and it still translates well. That’s important.
With metal and rock, a clean midrange is super important too, right, because the mixes are so dense?
Yeah, with rock and metal productions being so dense, it's like pretty much everything has to be the loudest thing. [Laughs] So having more headroom has been one of the coolest things for me. As I said before, we're not mixing critically at super ear-piercing volumes, but there's always that point where we’ve been working on a part with an artist for a couple of hours and you just want to hear it and want it to feel like you're watching the band at a concert, playing the song! You’d be surprised at how loud some artists want to listen back to their songs. And there have been times before when we had some smaller format speakers and we have a pretty large room, so we would push it up to those ear-splitting levels and it would sound absolutely terrible – it would just sound like a huge Bluetooth speaker or something – because it wasn't able to handle what was needed for that room size and was overloading.
I don't even think I've ever pushed the 110s past halfway; they have so much headroom and it's just been really nice to be able to push it high and know that I'm not actually pushing these speakers very hard at all, but it's already at a level where everyone in the room can hear it really clearly and it sounds exciting. It’s loud, but the mix isn't falling apart.
Since the music is inherently loud, if you can get an accurate picture while mixing for long hours at lower volumes, that has to be good for your ears.
Yeah, absolutely. Also, say we've already settled on a guitar tone, but then there's a synth patch that needs to come through without it being the harshest thing ever, that's where having a speaker that can translate stuff well really helps. Because if you're too conservative with your move, you might get in a car or a non-studio space and not hear it at all.
That’s become so important to what we do at Sparrow Sound – through the process, we try to listen a lot on consumer electronics, like phones, AirPods, car stereos etc, and what's great about the ATCs is that they do translate well to those systems.
You want to be able to make a move confidently and then listen on what the majority of people are going to listen on, and for whatever reason, the ATCs have been great, at least as far as the larger format speakers go – it's no competition at all. They just make it fun to work and that's the most important thing for a producer.
Obviously, you want it to translate for the mix engineer, but you also just want it to sound fun and make everybody in the room excited about what you're working on. That’s a big thing too! Even if we weren't mixing a note, you want the artist to be enjoying what they're hearing. I think what's cool about the ATC 110s is they're flat enough that you know what you're working on is accurate, but they're exciting enough that when you push them, it's fun.
How easy was it to tailor the ATCs to your space?
When it became time to upgrade, we were looking at a bunch of different ATC options and Dan Braunstein, a friend of mine who also produces Spiritbox, had the ATC 45s, I want to say. I was deciding between a few different brands and he was like, “You’ve got to come hear my ATCs in my room”. I went and I was instantly sold.
I started talking to Patrick Carpenter at Vintage King, and he said, “Honestly, your room's pretty big. We have these used ATC 110s that are pretty much going to be the same price as the 45s, if you want to check those out as well.” I thought that was cool because they were in great condition and they would be shipped to us from Nashville or something.
But, during shipping, one of the shipping companies just absolutely obliterated the speakers. They showed up off the truck destroyed, through no fault of Vintage King. Someone messed up and the cones were all dented. I called Patrick and he immediately handled it. He had the ATC rep in LA bring a set of 150s for about two months and obviously there was insurance and everything. So both ATC and Vintage King helped us out so much by letting us borrow the 150s while they were building a new set of 110s.
Through the whole process, it was the best customer service, and then we got a new set of speakers. One of the LA reps for ATC actually came and set the monitors up. He placed them in the room where he thought would be the best so that it didn’t have as much influence from the walls being close to them. Then we moved our desk in relation to where he said the speakers should be, so we didn't have a lot of trouble making them sound awesome in the room – they instantly sounded amazing.
That’s a long way of answering the question, but it was cool because through all that crazy process, someone from the company actually placed them for us, so there was not as much guesswork. Like I said, I can't focus too much on the science because if I did, I would never get anything done but they were able to handle that, which was really nice.
Patrick works with a lot of my friends in the music industry in LA, like Zakk Cervini and Dan Braunstein, who I mentioned earlier. With the community of rock and metal guys in LA, we're always meeting up and talking about the newest cool thing we're using and that’s one of the other great things about Vintage King – when you're near one of their showrooms, you can go check things out.
For a genre that's so focused on everything being aggressive, I think why some of us have gravitated towards ATC is because it handles those sounds well without taming them to the point of where you don't know what you're listening to. And I think Vintage King has done a really great job of pointing us towards stuff that they know is going to work really well for us and giving us the chance to try it out.
What are some of your favorite pieces of outboard gear?
One of the combos that Joseph and I love best for rock and metal vocals, which you wouldn't probably expect because it's more of a pop chain, is the Sony C-800G into a Vintech 573 preamp (which is a Neve 1073 reproduction), into the Tube-Tech CL 1B, which is our favorite vocal compressor. It just does something so nice to the vocals and instantly puts them into the mix the way we like it, even with no EQ. That's something we obviously didn't invent; Howard Benson has been doing that forever with that mic or with an ELA M 251. So I would definitely say the 251, the Sony C-800G, or an SM7B are pretty much the only mics you'll catch me using in the studio because they all work so well.
We still have a set of the trusty NS10s – it's what we started on. We have the same Infinity Sub that Chris Lord-Alge used because we definitely idolized him early on and we started out just trying to reproduce everything he did. [Laughs] So the CL 1B and the Sony C-800G would be the desert island gear I’d pick, if I had to record vocals forever.
How do you feel about plug-ins?
We use all the plug-ins! [Laughs] When I started recording with my bands a long time ago, we would go into other studios, and the computers definitely weren't to the point where you could simulate a mix in real time while you were tracking it. It was very much like there's a tracking session and a mixing session, and, luckily, technology has moved to where you can pretty much track in a finished-sounding template the whole time without latency, so we generally do that. We’ll turn off the plug-ins that cause a lot of latency, like a tape modeling plug-in, for example, or the limiter on the Master won’t be on, but everything else will be.
It’s pretty insane how you can have a great sounding mix template while you're working and that's been such an important thing to us – having the song leave the studio with the client on the first day in its demo form, sounding like a finished mix. In a city like LA, when you're competing with a thousand songwriters, producers, studios, and mixers, you don't really have the luxury of time.
We definitely rely on plug-ins. There’s no chance I'm going to be able to have like two hundred EQs on an analog console. If you look at our mix and see how many FabFilters there are on there, it's probably at least a hundred by the time the mix is done. [Laughs]
A lot of times, there are 20 tracks of vocals, 20 tracks of drums, 10 tracks of guitar, and then in the production folder, who knows how many tracks there are, so that's definitely something that plug-ins have allowed us to do. I remember starting with Pro Tools LE, and you had 12 total tracks, so we would be bouncing down six tracks of guitars onto one stereo track and then comping it.
It’s really awesome because when we started, it was a little more restrictive for plug-ins, not just because of what your computer could run, but how much they cost back then. I remember the first CLA bundle I bought was $700 for three compressors. Nowadays, you see them for $29.99 and I think it's smart. The industry realized that everyone was pirating plug-ins but when they make them at a price that a thousand more people can buy, they do. It seems like they finally found the sweet spot of how much plug-ins should cost.
And then you have the Black Friday sales where you can really go all out!
Yeah! Every Black Friday, I get the bundle I've been looking at all year that I haven't gotten yet. [Laughs] Back in the day, even Soundtoys and other such bundles were thousands of dollars and they would go down to $299 on Black Friday.
It's a good system.
Yeah, what's been so cool is the experimental side of things. Being able to automate plug-ins on Pro Tools or whatever DAW you're using has really pushed music in a way that I don't think would have happened if everyone was having to spend $200 an hour to rent a console at a huge studio somewhere. It’s cool that someone starting out can hear what an SSL EQ or a Pultec sounds like. It's definitely cool that even a standard laptop nowadays can run a pretty intensive session.
What's a typical day like for you at the studio when you're not on tour?
I'm generally either songwriting for a project we're working on or producing, and the production end is a lot of trial and error – just a lot of tinkering, like, “Let's try this plug-in or sample that we found” and things like that. So for me, there's not always an endpoint – it’s experimentation and seeing where it can go. What Joseph does is a lot more logical. He’s mixing for the most part and he does engineering as well – he's probably the best vocal engineer I know.
Both Joseph and I are doing what we can to synergistically finish something in the shortest amount of time we can. It’s cool to be able to do that when we're competing with the best people in the world. For us, it’s been a 12-year journey in LA, trying to level up our game and do what we can to stand out among everyone who's the best in the world.
The way the LA rock and metal scene works nowadays is kind of interesting. Bands will come to LA, set up writing sessions with five or six producers, and go from studio to studio. With those sessions, either the band brings an idea or we work with one that we have and try as best as we can to finish the song within a day or two. That’s when the listening environment, knowing the room, the speakers and a rough template really helps us because sometimes we leave those sessions on Day One with a finished song. As much as it might sound soulless, that’s still a band coming through and finishing a song, and you have to be fast enough that the workflow doesn't impede the ideas that could happen.
It’s probably better if actual humans are putting out music at that speed than AI, though. Rick Beato had a video recently where he explored how AI platforms make music. Quite frankly, it was terrifying.
It is terrifying! I had the same morbid curiosity that he probably had. [Laughs] I opened one of those websites, gave it a prompt and it was immediately obvious that it doesn't sound good and it sounds fake. But you also see that it is able to generate, in seconds, something that sounds like a song and we're at the birth of that now.
It’s not something that I've integrated into a workflow because for me, it still sounds artificial, but, at the same time, you don't want to be the guys fighting Napster. [Laughs] I definitely wouldn't say I support the technology that's going to eventually end my career, but I do like to keep tabs on where it's at because of the discourse around it. So I guess we'll see just how far the technology will go in these next couple of years. I do think that there's something intrinsically human about writing a touching piece of music that AI will never replicate.
It's scary, but also, for my sanity, I have to believe that people will always gravitate towards something that was born in a human mind. And you know, it would be nice if they would find a way to generate these AI things without needing a nuclear plant to power it. [Laughs] It takes insane amounts of energy to generate a song about your friend going to Subway or whatever.
It’s fun, it's the new thing, and I’m sure people were talking this way about plug-ins and Autotune and computers in the mid-90s or whenever that was first happening. I don't want to be a stick in the mud about it, but I also want to keep my distance and not rely on it.
Is there anything about the LA metal scene that would surprise people?
It’s not really competitive in the negative sense of the word. We’re all listening to each other's stuff and going, “Man, he did it again! I’ve got to figure out what he's doing there!” And I think it's helped us level up to being in a place where there are so many amazing, gifted mixers, producers, and songwriters and it's really cool to be in a place or be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys.
So many people who are steering where the rock and metal genre has gone for the last decade are all centered in LA, so it's cool to be in the city around that excitement. There’s an energy to being in a city where there's a lot of cool art happening and I think that's what has kept me in LA. Being from Alabama originally, it's obviously a huge change of pace, but it's helpful to be in a place where everybody's at their A-game because we wouldn't feel that kind of pressure to level up our game if we weren't around so many awesome, talented people like that.
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