Welcome to Featured Artists Live, a weekly show to discuss and listen to your music. With help from my other YouTuber buddies, we hope to give you words of encouragement, guidance or simply just enjoy your wonderful creations. I'd like to thank our sponsor DistroKid, all of the wonderful artists and all of you for watching. Now, let's get on with the show. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you well. It's 7am here in Perth, Western Australia. I'm a musician out of bed early in the day. It's an amazing thing, I can tell you, it doesn't happen very often. I'm so glad to see everyone here in the live chat. Thank you so much for joining me here. It's, as I say, morning for me, but it could be evening or lunchtime for you. Who knows? Thank you so much for being here. Do make sure you hit that like button to let YouTube know it should tell other people about this live stream. The more the merrier, I say. Big thank you to the sponsor of course, DistroKid. You can see the link up there. I will talk about them during the show and of course, if you follow that link, you'll get a further 7% discount off of their already cheap package there for uploading music to distribute to the world. We are going to be listening to some music today. I'm kind of excited because we have three very different pieces of music. One which is in a genre, which I don't think we've had on the show. This is episode 20 by the way. I don't think we've had this particular genre on the show at all. So I'm quite excited about that. One which I think is, I think we've got a few things to say about this track in different ways. But one thing I think is it's an excellent example of using virtual instruments and making them sound really live. And it was one that it was only when I saw the notes where I thought, oh, so they are using virtual instruments. I wasn't really sure. And so that's a really interesting example there. And one which I think is a really good simplistic approach to a song, a straightforward approach, not complex, beautiful songwriting and should be inspirational to all of us in terms of what we can do with only a small amount of equipment. So that's the songs for the show, which I'm very much looking forward to. And I'm looking forward to looking at them with a couple of very fine guests, a couple of guys who I'm going to tell you now are not just colleagues of mine in terms of, you know, we have social media presence to do with music and recording, but also good friends of mine. And that is something I cherish very much. So just top guys that they are, of course, the first one I'm going to bring up for you is, of course, Ricky T Brown. And he is from the Home Recording Studio Zone. Good day, Ricky. How are you going, mate? Hi, everybody. There he is. Somewhere near the bottom. I'm going to sink down here for you, Ricky. So I level his level. All right, OK. Sorry. Look, I don't want to sit up now because I feel like I'm being all superior to you or something like that. But no, no. This for those watching, you can look at the link in the description down below. Ricky is the leader and the founder of the best home recording studio group on Facebook in the universe. The top one. The reason it's good, Ricky, is because of you, because you make a friendly, welcoming place. And that sets the tone for a community, I believe, when the person at the top is there for everyone and encouraging everyone. So thank you so much for providing that service for us. Thank you. And thank you so much for being here. Now, I haven't seen you or I haven't. We've spoken before the show about a few things, which we won't talk about, have we? But how have you been recently? Like, many recovering from the splurge of that. Oh, what did you get? What did you get in the Black Friday sales? Tell me. I'm not saying because I think the misses might be watching. Did you buy anything as a result of my videos at all, Ricky? Quite possibly. Quite possibly. But, yeah, you know that feeling when you've had two doughnuts, too many. Oh, yeah, like that. Yeah, I think I ain't going to do this again for a while. So, yeah. But I've got a couple of good things in there, though. It's a funny thing, isn't it? When you buy hardware or plugins, that I don't know, I sort of feel a measure of whether you should have bought it or not. Is then how much time you really spend afterwards delving into the details of how to use it, you know, maybe watching a video on YouTube about it or or reading the manual. Dare I say, I mean, if you're, you know, I reckon if you get it and then you go, oh, yeah, I'll sort of get to it later and you don't really look at that stuff and you probably shouldn't have got it. Oh, dear, you look guilty now. Oh, dear man. Well, it's great to have you here. I want to push on and bring in our other esteemed guests, a friend to both of us. I know, a very valued man indeed. We have Dan, the lonely rocker. Of course, we like to make sure he isn't lonely. How are you going, Dan? Cheers to all the sausages out there. Don't read anything. Dan, I have been super, super busy and haven't had a chance to watch your channel this week. What are you going to use? What have you released this week on your channel? What videos have you released? Well, actually, I literally just before this live stream, I was frantically touching up my description and I just dropped my DIY acoustic panel 3.0. Yes, that's a must watch. That's a must watch. Also sponsored by our good friends at District Kit, actually, they got to join me. And I have a few different series on my channel. I'm almost at 200 videos, but I don't have a band as the flagship series that's devoted to the Home Studio enthusiast and we just hit episode 100. So I decided to go back to what everyone knows, why everyone knows me, acoustic panel. So you've got to give me some advice there, Mike, if you don't have to say. So we did it and I got a cool new design. All say is for those who want to make panels, but hate that, I got you. You don't have to wrap with this. Can I just say as a little bit of a sales pitch to those watching, I for many years, like most people, you know, focused on buying microphones and this and that for the studio, the stuff with knobs on it, right? Isn't that the fun stuff, right? And sort of may do with some kind of makeshift room treatment or what have you. And the time, the first time I really got some decent room treatment was like, oh my God, why didn't I do this earlier?  And just because you are known for the acoustic panels, Dan, and how to build them for those watching, Dan has some guides on how to build them, which are just invaluable and not too expensive too, which is highly important. So that takes away all the barriers. You've just got to get on and do it. But did you do the same, Dan? Did you sort of struggle on for many years without using them or has it always been a part of what you felt was important? Well, it's funny when I started the acoustic panel or the, sorry, the whole studio journey, I've been writing and recording music at home ever since I had a four track cassette recorder, never considered it a home studio. And when I actually recently moved to this house, as you guys know, but the previous house, I had a nice big space and I decided I wanted to just make things sound better. I had this riff I was writing and I said, oh, I need a couple of things. And there was an audio interface and speakers. So I started researching on how to mix. And I recognized that the environment I was in was insufficient. And so I very quickly started doing some research. And the funny thing is, I just mentioned episode 100. Like I said, I've almost 200 videos on my channel. Episode one was the acoustic panel. So that was really the early days of my studio that's grown with my channel, which is kind of nice. I mean, I didn't come at this as some big studio guy. I've been growing with my channel. So I recognized early on that I needed to improve the situation at my desk. And for someone who is not really that experienced as a mixer, I'll tell you, the first thing I noticed was the sound was definitely more focused. It's the best way I could describe it. The sound was coming from in front of me instead of from all around me. And I could, you know, whether or not it's tuned perfectly. And I'll tell you, I interviewed an acoustic specialist, a studio designer who will be another video on my channel in the next couple of weeks. And I asked him about DIY panels. And he said, you know what? He knows that everyone can afford someone to come and take readings and do everything like that. He said, let's put up some panels. He'll make it better and just start making music. So I'm glad I did that early on. And I've just been growing and growing more and more and the studio is starting to surround me with my stuff. And we've got a few more coming in this week. So we're out. Awesome. Well, everybody check the link in the description down below for Dan's channel. And if you have not got any room treatment or you've got room treatment and you want to improve it, then go and follow the link and take a look at that video for me please. It's always worthwhile. He makes excellent videos on these subjects. Yeah, it's brilliant. Yeah, really good. I just want to say hello to some people in the chat down here. Just pulling up some random comments here as well, which won't make sense out of context, I guess. But there you go. Hi to Keonra Music. I know that she's also in the same location as me. Probably less than one or two kilometers from me we found out in a chat recently, which is really, really, really interesting. So thanks for the effort because we're both up very early. This morning here in Perth, Western Australia. Thank you so much for being here. Also, Al Ban here. Thank you so much for being here. Of course, Doug is a regular here. Thank you so much again, Doug. I'm glad that we're able to do it at a time, which is so much better for you over there in the US. And we have, I can't pronounce this one, but I know you're a regular. W question mark fight. There is something I'm missing there about that one. I can be a bit dim when it comes to clever names and things. Emily, thank you so much for being here. Also, Tim, wonderful to have you here. And as I say, just make sure you smash that like button, guys, and let other people know that they should come here. We're gonna get on with the show and I teased a little bit at the beginning about some of the music we've got coming up. I think we've got something to get our teeth stuck into. And the first one that we're gonna listen to, gentlemen, I will pop up the name here. In fact, talking about names, you can come to agreement with me. This is by Sid Thomas. And is this a different spelling that I'm not used to of Nancy? Ricky, I'll ask you. Or is it Nancy? Long. Nancy. Nonce. Nancy. It's gonna go Nancy. Dan, you think Nancy? Because I wanted it to be Sid and Nancy. Does anyone get the reference? But it's not Sid and Nancy. Sid and Nancy. Well, Sid and Nancy weren't very innocent either. So. So this is innocent. And the reason why I thought this was interesting and as soon as I heard it, I thought, yeah, I wanna play this on the show is because it's nice to be able to represent different genres on the show. I know some people may feel at times, oh, there's certain genres are ignored. And that's because they don't often get submitted to be honest with you, certain genres. So I'm really happy to say, I think this is the first jazz song that we've had on the show. So that's really interesting for me. And I'll tell you that it's a remote collaboration. So Sid recorded the backing tracks in Cakewalk. He lives in the UK. And he sent them over to Nantes in New Zealand for recording the vocals and things. There was a bit of a collaboration went on there. Interesting again, in terms of gear here. So the interface was a Behringer Euphoria. I'm not totally familiar with Behringer stuff, but a UMC 404 HD. Again, a Behringer microphone on the vocals, the C1, which I've spoken about before. I think I had it myself many years ago. And many people start off with the Behringer C1. External, I don't know about this one. I think Ricky May, there was a piano used, which is a Kawaii CA67 piano. Don't know if you're familiar with the model, but I guess they make great pianos. We hear a clarinet in this and a Roland JV 1010 module, which I'm guessing is a sound module. In terms of virtual instruments, interestingly for cakewalk users here, and there's a very old sort of, what would you call it, a general MIDI instrument, which still comes with cakewalk called the TTS-1. It's just been around for yonks anyway. The bass, electric piano and pad sounds were from that. Easy drummer for the drums. Probably shouldn't have said that because we could have conned Dan into thinking they're real drums and we don't have anything to talk about. Yeah, easy to tell. And Sonatas Reaver, which comes with cakewalk, Sonatas multi-band compressor and Ozone Imager, which is that. So that's all the stuff. Let's have a listen to this piece of music. As I say, it's called Ina Centi. Something just a little bit different there, hey? So nice to have that on the show. Thank you so much for contributing that song, Sid and Nancy. And also, I just forgot to mention earlier to others watching and watching in the live chat and on the replay, you can submit your songs, of course, to be listened to on this show and have some fun. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next time. Bye. My wonderful guest, follow the link in the description down below for that. Let's go over to Dan the Lonely Rocky here, first of all, to get his feedback. I think I saw both of you taking notes during the listening of this. So I'm really interested. That's a little mic. This is a bit different, wasn't it, Dan? Yeah, you know, I love jazz, actually. I know called the Lonely Rocker, but actually back in my high school days, it was the air of the school where all the rockers used to hang out. And one day I brought a radio and started cranking jazz, and a friend of mine who was a guitar person, why are you playing this here? I said, you like jazz? Yeah, but not here. I said, ah, be proud. Love it. Jazz, I think, I mean, honestly, the greatest musicians in the world have some point of jazz training. And it's maybe not something you listen to every day, but this was interesting because a lot of people, when they think of jazz, they think about complexities. And this was actually quite simple. And I love compositions that are based on one riff and then everything around it changes. The dynamics, the vocals were lovely. She's got a lovely voice, the different instrumentation there. Very, very simple mix, not a lot going on, so there was a lot of space to play with. I loved her range. I loved her, just the emotion in her voice and really, really enjoyed it. I saw someone in the comments actually said they were just waiting for a bass line to kick in. I was kind of feeling the same thing. Like, it had a room for even just something lying in the weeds. And I don't know if it's because we're listening to it on the internet. And I'm just trying to be critical here just for a couple of constructive points, not because I think it needs it. I almost felt like the vocals could have used a little bit more air, because it was such an airy mix. I felt a little, and again, it just could be because we're listening to it via the stream. These headphones also tend to be a little bassy, but I was almost like, wanted to feel a little bit more breath in the vocal, but really, I got nothing bad to say. I really enjoyed the song and it was nice to have something a little different. And you know what? I joke about samples and virtual instruments, but it was done tastefully and it shows that you can use it virtually any genre. And you can fool a lot of people these days. So, but nicely done, nicely done. Good stuff. Ricky, am I right that you come from a bit of a jazz background, don't you? I remember you saying a couple of times on the show that you very much, that's your sort of heritage. So you've got to be, I mean, you must have heard some really great jazz over the years. Different times and perhaps been involved with great jazz musicians over the years. Yeah, my first band actually was a jazz fusion band. So, yeah, that's where my roots are, really. And I often go back there. Yeah. So every few tracks, I need to do a jazz one now. Yeah. Well, tell me, because I'm not edgy, I mean, I hear jazz and I go, you know, I realize that jazz is a term for a broad range, actually, of different styles of music. And, you know, I sort of heard and I thought, I know this is jazz, but what kind of jazz would you call this? I sort of think of it as like a lounge jazz. Is that even a thing? I don't know. But what would you describe this as? Well, that must be an interesting thing with this one, you know, because it reminded me of three different things. I mean, I could hear a bit of Tanya Maria in the vocal delivery on this one.  And then again, you know, there was like this Parisian kind of vibe going on, Smunky Club.  You know, because I mean, I noticed that, OK, there were two piano parts going on. And I was a little bit concerned that, well, OK, the first one was slightly on the left. But when the keys came in at the bottom end, of a keyboard, they were pushed slightly to the right. So yeah, I noticed that myself. Yeah, it was an interesting balance there. And it was so simple, but it was driving, though, you know. So, yeah, totally hear you, Dan, on the bass, man. Yeah, that would have killed this track because it didn't need to be complicated, but just hop to drive it a bit more. Just help it to drive it a bit more. But I absolutely love that. And thank you for playing that, Mike. Yeah, we had a comment there from Tim, which I'll just put up a moment ago. I'll pop it up here again. He was saying he liked Out of the Hills, but he felt it needs a change to another theme. I mean, I know that with music, of course, we, you know, we're going to have, ask 10 people, you get 10 different opinions. But what do you feel about that? Do you think it could have benefited from another change? I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what. I mean, OK, yes. If you're a jazzer, you know, you'd probably look to put another part in there. But for me, the length of the track, it got away with the fact that it was rolling around one riff.  And it moved the arrangement somewhere else. And then the vocalist was changing what she was doing as well. So had this track been, like, you know, six, seven minutes long and that same riff, I would have thought, OK, you need a change here. But I didn't feel that with this. So I understand what the commentator says that, you know. But that's the thing about jazz, there's always the temptation to throw in something else. Chord-wise, a nice little twist. Yeah. But I think it worked as it is, as it presented. So to the artists that gave you this track to put on there, well done to them. I really enjoyed it. And if you just sat in just a little bit of bass, yeah, you'd kill it with this one, OK? I think that would have added to the intrigue of the song because, you know, obviously, what this commentator is saying, you know, it's a challenge to write a song based on one riff.  And that's where something like adding some more instruments, bringing in some bass, bringing a bit of rhythm but keep the pattern the same, just that builds up that way. I think nothing that sounds like it, but there's a song that sticks in my mind that at least had a song when the world is running down and the best in the world is running down. It's real long. It's basically a bass line with nine notes. Three chords for the whole song with a small breakdown in the middle. But it's such a groovy song and the dynamics around it change. The guitar change is the intensity of the vocalist change. And it's such a great song. It's so memorable. So I like what they will be on for a year.  I mean, of course, it had bass in there, but I guess we're talking about perhaps the thicker bass in terms of the sonic sonic value. And someone said it could do with a walking bass so I'm not sure what a bass line rather than just a root note to the chord that we're on there. But no, it was really good. I want to thank them as well. There's a couple of points in there that I want to mention about it in terms and hopefully they'll inspire people who are just starting out with this whole thing. But first of all, I want to say that I really love to the clarinet in there. I wasn't sure on the first I thought, is this a soprano sax? Or it reminded me of Branford Marcellus or something like that, which was just very, very cool. What I loved about the clarinet was one of my favorite parts was the way it was sort of improvising around the riff at the beginning, but then it went in unison with the vocal towards the end, which is something we don't often do in contemporary music. And I just really enjoyed it. I don't know, I mean, I guess you could have done that on a virtual instrument, but I think the fact that this was a real instrument in this case was what made that work so well. The organic nature of the instrument with the vocal there. I'm just being a little bit facetious in saying, I'm with Dan's camp here. If that had been a virtual clarinet, I don't know if it would have just been as good at all. But I thought it was great. And the things that were virtual instruments were good, you know, the easy drum and stuff like that. I was, another little note, the pads, they came in just at the end, which I just thought is lovely, just not, you know, it's so tempting because they sounded really good. I could have done them from halfway through, but it's just nice to have a change right at the end of a piece of music sometimes. It can be very cool indeed. But the main thing I wanted to mention here in terms of inspiring people was that microphone, that Behringer C1. You're gonna see people like me and Dan and you'll see Ricky on his Facebook. We're talking about microphones. And I know that I certainly review some quite expensive microphones at times and I love them and they're great. But I wanna, this is a great example of do not let that be a barrier to you. If you just can't afford those expensive microphones or it's not a priority to you in terms of other equipment. This, to be honest with you, is not a great microphone compared to many other microphones you can buy, but it's a very affordable microphone and it did not have any effect on this track at all. Her vocals just sounded great, you know. So you can get a great vocal sound from a less expensive microphone. That's the kind of message I wanna give people who are watching from this song. Don't, you know, do watch my videos and Dan's videos, et cetera, when we review these things. But don't ever think, oh, I just don't have enough money for this recording, Malaki. Oh, I went a bit Joe Biden then, didn't I, Malaki? But, you know, if you think that, no, do not let that be a barrier. I know many of you in the comments are using a free door cakewalk, which is a good stuff. And the other thing in this is that the plug-ins used, we mentioned, you know, having us splurge on Black Friday at the beginning, but the plug-ins used were many, many free plug-ins here in terms of virtual instruments, in terms of the reverb, in terms of the, you know, things like that. Stock, a lot of it is stock stuff which came with cakewalk. So guys, we live in wonderful, wonderful times.  Talking about not spending a whole heap of money and making things happen. Our good sponsor, DistroKid, who Dan is pointing to right now, the creative source part of that link is what he's pointing to. Thank you, Dan. You can follow that link in the description and just so you, if in case you don't know you're new to this or you've been under a rock or whatever, DistroKid is this service where you can upload your music and they take care of the rest in terms of getting it to Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, you know, and it's so simple. It's so simple. If you've been able to join this live stream and sign up for YouTube, then you can do that with DistroKid. It's not complex. You don't have to open up 20 accounts for different things. They do all of that for you.  Now, if you do follow the link in the description down below, it's going to take you to a special page on DistroKid with this yellow banner at the top. That banner is letting you know that you're going to get a further 7% discount of your first year if you sign up here. And let's face it, it's already very cheap. If we scroll down, we can see that year's membership is $19.99 per year for an unlimited number of albums and songs. And so long as it's your own music, there are no extra charges and you get to keep all of the royalties from the various platforms. Platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Pandora, Amazon, Instagram, Tidal, iHut, RadioDeezer and more. OK, so if I know many people watching in the live chat are already using DistroKid and I'd encourage you to sign up and also get your music out to the world. Stop having it on the hard drive of your computer just sitting there thinking you're going to mix it forever and ever. Don't do that. Get your music out to the world and move on to the next song. OK, that's my little bit of advice there. That was a good start to the show, that song. A really good start to the show. And now we've got something completely different. Again, much more contemporary this. This is, I'll just grab the actual title over here. It's somewhere there, Heiner. Let's have Dan read this out. This you can read out the artist and title. Well, Dan, that's an easy one. We've got two words to say. Take it easy on the dog, Mark. See, I'm not going to say you give him the easy one, dear. I don't want you to be the old one. Well, that's because I know he's less literate than you, Ricky. So carry on. The Rain King is when the rain came. Wonderful. If the artist is in the chat and I don't know, the ranking from what I can gather, it sounds like a band, but it's really one person using your band name and that is Mark. Mark, if you're in the chat, when I saw this, I thought, oh, I wonder if this is inspired by a great song. One of my favorite songs by the Counting Crows called The Rain King. Just wondered maybe there could be an inspiration there. I could be taken off track. I love Counting Crows. That was a great album, their first album, one of my favorite ones. I look to the album when I think of good production and I think I can go back and listen to just the basics there, the balance, the sonic qualities of each instrument, just a great songwriting as well from the Counting Crows. I'm a bit of a fanboy there. Don't mind telling you that. Anyway, this song was recorded in Sona, which for my guests who may not know, Sona is the previous version of Cakewalk when it was owned by Gibson, maybe even when it was owned by Roland and all that. So basically Cakewalk. Audio Interface is an old line six device, Toneport UX2, which is interesting. I haven't used any line six stuff, but I know they get a bad rap amongst guitarists unanimously. So they're very popular at some stage and then became hated by everyone at some other stage for some reason. I wouldn't know why, but I see the Facebook comments. A Berenger B1 condenser microphone used to record the vocals. I didn't intend for this, by the way. This just happened to be a theme of the show anyway. VST instruments, an easy drummer, easy bass. Our G-Force, what do we have? G-Force M-Tron Pro for the Melotron Flutes. I haven't heard of that plugin, but it sounds interesting, like it made me a bit of a Melotron. Some Hammond organ in there and a little bit of electric piano, not specific about which VST instrument. Plugins used Nectar II on the vocals. This is a great plugin. I used Nectar myself for some years. In actual fact, I think the second version of it. I know the third version was very, very different and lovely, but I reckon the second version of it, they got a lot of sound in it, right? Some of the presets are awesome actually for vocals there. And again, something Line 6 Pod Farm for amps. I'm looking towards Dan here because I'm feeling that he may know something about Line 6 stuff, but I'm not sure. Easy Mix presets on the acoustic guitars and Easy Mix presets on the Master Bus. A little bit of a quote here from the composer and producer. This is such a common thing. I have very little time or patience for mixing and mastering or learning how to. And always had a long queue of new songs I want to work on, so I'm normally aiming for a demo that captures the vibe fairly quickly so I can move on to the next one. I do very little e-cuing, sometimes none at all, I'm ashamed to say, and probably throw Easy Mix presets around too freely. I do spend quite a bit of time working on details in MIDI, especially trying to get drums to sound natural and dynamic. So let's listen for that and have a comment on it afterwards. I always plan to go back to songs like this and get deeper into the mixing one day. There you go. I hope I'm just double checking here before we get going. I've actually loaded the song up ready to play. I think I have. So let's have a listen to this then, when the rain came from the rain kings. One, two, three, four. These chasing that high But don't it make you wonder Wonder where it ain't came Who's on your heart But just to say The days ain't gone The days ain't gone When times went bad This is where we wander Days ain't gone To leave it right to the end so we can hear all those little guitar squeaks and things, I like it when people leave those things in at the end of fade out some things. Anyway, enough about me and what I think. I want to hear what Ricky T Brown has to think about this. I know what you're going to say. Everyone assumes that you don't like this kind of genre of music, don't they Ricky? They put you in that little box. They go either jazz or hip hop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm all of those things. So yeah, I think I can listen to it objectively. Yeah, this one. I really like the song. Yeah, the vocalist means really good. Really good. Only thing I would have said about the vocal, it was just a little bit too wet. Yeah, a lot of people said it was too wet too, yeah. There is a lot of reverb splashing around in there. I think the guitars, they were probably a little louder than I would have been comfortable with. And they too had loads of reverb on them. But it was kind of saved by the bass and drums coming in because that seemed to mop up a lot of that splashiness. And it's a really good song. But I think, you know, no disrespect to the artist. Have another go at mixing this because I think there's a better balance to be struck with this one. So great song. Just dial back on the reverb a little bit. You don't need that much space in there, you know. I mean, I think by, I haven't got a monotone yet. I seem to remember in the artist's email to me that he was very, very aware of having a bit of a 90s Brit pop sound to his music. That's what he leans towards. That's what he'd like. So do you think that an element of that reverb might maybe stylistic? Someone mentioned Noel Gallagher and stuff in the comments there a couple of times and come to think of it, yeah, Oasis could have a little bit of reverb on the vocal. Do you think there may be an element of that too? Or was it just simply too much? Yeah, I felt that it was a little bit too much. I mean, the difference between it being perfect and where it is now, isn't big. It just needs to come back a bit. So it allows the actual instruments to breathe a bit more and sound. You get more of a character of the instruments if you use a little less reverb, you know. Right, that's true. It's just a little bit too much. I would suggest as well, and I hear you on that. I happen to agree. I was playing a little bit of devil's advocate there. On the reverb, because the artist did mention that he's probably, I'm guessing, not so much doesn't have time to do lots of EQing, but normally when people are avoiding tasks, it's also because they don't feel overly confident in those areas. I understand that there's still many areas I don't feel very confident in, and you tend to avoid them in your mixes or techniques, I should say. And I would suggest here that it may not even be the amount of EQing, because having heard our comments, the artist may think, I'll just turn down the length of the EQ or how much I'm sending to the signal of the bus. But I would say EQing the reverb may make a reasonable difference here. As a rule of thumb, I tend to EQ the signal going to the reverb. Some people do EQ the reverb itself, but the signal going to the reverb, I like to take the low end out of it and a good part of the mids. Personally, I find that always takes the muddiness out of EQ, so you can get a bit more of an airy EQ, which doesn't then get in the way of the main vocal too much. It allows that dry signal to come through and get stronger on those frequencies. But that's my little tip. Enough of my tips. Let's hear what Dan's tips are for this song. Can I talk to the artist directly? I don't know if they're here. Mr. Rain King's. Maybe I can call you Rain, if that's okay. Mark, you can call him. Mark, okay, Mark. Mr. Mark the Rain King. All right, the artist said it himself that the mix is shaked. Okay, so I don't even think we should talk about the mix, because he said it's a demo. So once it's a demo, it's a demo. We can polish a turd all day long. But this is a good song. Bottom line, I was listening to it going, man, I could hear any popular artist in that genre, in a studio with a producer and a hot mixer, and this song would just be on the rate. It has that melody, that familiarity. You can't place it, but it feels familiar. You know what I'm talking about? And the dynamics, I love his voice. I love the dynamics of the song. Great song. He's a songwriter. I mean, that's basically what he said.  He just doesn't have time to mix the song. So I don't think there's any discussion about the mix. There is no mix. This is a demo. But he said so, right? I mean, when he was sort of sitting up, he was like, all right, he's preparing us. It's not going to sound very good. But I really, really like, there's a song here. I beg him, if he doesn't have time, go into the home recording studio zone. There's always people willing to mix stuff for free, just for practice. Yes, for free. Find somebody to mix the damn song, because it's a good song. In fact, as far as saying, it's a very good song. And in the right hands, with the right mix, you're going to give people goosebumps. That's all I got to say. It's fine, because when the song was playing, when I was listening to it yesterday, I just happened to have my acoustic guitar in my hand. I was just playing along with it, you know? That gave me a little bit of insight into the chord structure a little bit. And there's been so much chat, hasn't there, over the last two or three weeks, about the Beatles. I always talk about the Beatles, but because of the movie, that's come out again. And it makes us all, I think whether you're a Beatles fan or not, it's, they're just an interesting subject in terms of a body of songwriting work and production, of course, to listen to. And it just made me think, here's another person who has either first hand or second hand influence from the Beatles in terms of chord structure. You know, it was starting off on this heavy E minor chord and had an unexpected shift with, had the first chord progression. I think it was E minor, C, A minor, as I remember. Then had a little unexpected shift up to a B minor, which was, oh yeah, we don't hear that a lot these days in mainstream music on the radio. And then bang for the chorus goes to the big G major chord, lifting the whole thing up and going from that darkness to the brightness. A well-established trick of songwriting, which works every time almost. But yeah, just reminding me of all that bag of tricks that the Beatles always had at their disposal for songwriting in terms of just adjusting someone's mood with music. That's what it is, right? We're taking the listener on a journey in there. The listener goes, oh, I feel so right and happy in that bit because of that bag of tricks, as I call it. So I thought it was great songwriting. I agree with you there, Dan. And yeah, I really, actually, I hadn't thought of it, Dan, but I really agree with you there. This song deserves a better mix than this. I think the greatest- It deserves a mix. Yeah, not better. Yeah, that's right. But it was at a good enough stage because you can have terrible mixes, which will get in the way of a good song, which are so distractingly bad that you can't even hear the good song underneath it. So it was good enough for a demo mix, I think, as he said in his notes, he wanted to capture the vibe, is what he was saying in his quote, fairly quickly so he can move on to the next song. So I'm just going to encourage Mark to, on this occasion, take a pause, go back. Go back and just see what you can squeeze out of this one, or as Dan suggested, go to a community like Recording Studio Zone or indeed my own community and Dan's community and reach out to people and see if you can get some help on it if you don't have time. Collaborations are awesome in that way. I just received my drum track from Ed Thorne a couple of days ago for my new song. So I can't wait to get into my door and put that on there. And he sent me a couple of different versions, things that I hadn't thought of. That's the beauty of collaboration, isn't it? Is that when you go, oh, I hadn't thought of that, but that's a great idea. So I love that. But talking about getting mixes polished, and that's what you really want to do and put that extra nine yards in just before you release your music to the world. The honors go to Ricky T Brown this time to stick a index finger up in the air. Dear really. And as I mentioned, I love it. There we go. As I mentioned earlier, it's a simple process really to do this. You just have to prepare a little bit of material in preparation. A master is what you're going to want.  I had some songs on my computer hard drive for five, six, seven years before I released them.  Don't follow me on this example. You want to go ahead and do this. If you want to release your music via DistroKid, there's just a couple of things you need. First of all, the music itself. Here's mine in my door cakewalk, and I'm exporting it to an uncompressed wave file for best results. Now, the other thing you'll need is some artwork. I just grabbed an old photo, which I'd taken on the beach, chucked on some text here, and that's what I call art. Then I went over to DistroKid and I just have to fill in this extra easy form. It's a no-brainer form. You get helped all the way through with little hints and things. You can't really do anything wrong. You just go ahead and confirm a few things about your music, and then you just have to actually upload the artwork and the song itself. And DistroKid takes care of the rest. It's going to send it out to all of the best platforms so that people can hear and buy your music. Thank you so much to DistroKid for making the release of music nice and easy for us. Guys, have we talked about this? Do you remember the days? I think I talked about this with Dan, but Ricky, do you remember the days of the way you released your music was to burn your CDs and your CD burner? Oh, God, yeah. And you had one of those sticker kits to press. Yeah. Yes. Nito. That's it, Nito. That was the brand, wasn't it? Absolutely. I remember. Yeah. You get them from your local office supplier or something like that, you know? And they were rubbish. In the early days, the burners were rubbish, so you get failed burns time and time again. You had to do that whole thing, close the session and all that sort of stuff to do it. And once in a while, sticker would get a little bit wrinkled and all people would complain that it didn't work in their CD player. And, you know, some of them would not, some CD players couldn't really. That's all I'm saying. Philips. Philips could play nothing. They were rubbish. They were rubbish. It was a burn. It was a burn. Do you remember? There was a burner that allowed you to sort of scribe onto the disc itself, but it was so... Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. It was like... Like, yeah. I remember that. Who did that? I don't remember, but you... Well, yeah. Like, scribe or I don't know, it was something like that. And it was just like, I can't remember the title. So much easier now is to upload your song and get it out there.  The whole generation of music fans would never even see this. Yeah. Amazing. Incredible. But there you go. I am going to move on to the final song for this show. It's just been such a great show. I've really enjoyed this one. It's... I've had a tough week, but this has lifted my spirits enormously. And I want to remind people again. Light scribe. Someone just said there in the comments. Is that what I said? That's the one. Check the replay. Watch the replay. I said, let's go. Yeah. So I just want to remind people in the chat that, you know, you can... I was going to say donate your music. That's the wrong word. Submit your music for us to have a listen to. I just want to put this out there to the people in the community. I'm thinking of changing the name of this show. I'm actually thinking of changing the name of this show and the format slightly. We are always listening to music which has been released somewhere. Even if that's released, it's kind of a demo on SoundCloud or what have you. But we so often end up talking about the mix. I'm thinking about changing the show name to something like Fix My Mix or something like that and allowing people to submit mixes to me which have not been released anywhere, which are a work in progress and we can give them some feedback on that. Then they've got time to correct it based on our feedback. What say you in the chat about that? What say you in the comments if you're watching the replay? What say you, my esteemed guests? Yeah, great idea Mike. I think that would be a great plan and when it's all done, you can submit it. That's right, when it's done. When it deserves to be. Yeah, I think it's a good idea. Let us take part in your many years of progress in One Mix on One Song. We can be here episode after episode saying just a little bit less bass, just a little bit more vocal. We can keep the show going for years. So let's move on to our final song, something a bit different. I asked in my community during the week for people to let me know about their acoustic singer-songwriter kind of tracks and I had many, many submissions over there in my Facebook group, my Creative Source Cakewalk Facebook group which has just got over 2,000 members this week. 2.1,000 members going so nicely and I always have to credit Ricky T Brown for inspiring me. Not so much to create a Facebook group but the nature of the group, the vibe of the group, I'm totally trying to copy Home Recording Studio's own for that. I'm always looking at, yeah exactly, I'm always looking at the way he engages with his members and thinking oh that's a good idea, that's a great way to engage. Ricky's a great inspiration in that way. Let's have a listen to this song from, I'll just pop his in terms of equality, let's have Gary's name up there. Gary Meadows, this song is called Summertime, a well-used title in music but a different song. So this is not cover, this is our original music. Interesting this one, this was not recorded in DAW or DAW. This was recorded on a Korg D8, it's a digital recorder. I never used those, I always looked at them and thought oh that looks really good.  It's really interesting, does anyone else use that sort of technology? Still I'm interested to hear that. Anyway, I used a PV condenser microphone, unknown model, he can't remember. I know he said he had to stick some cotton wool in it or something because it sounded a bit harsh so there's a nice bit of improvisation there. A Yamaha guitar, very few tracks, just the guitar and the vocal, I think there's some harmony in there as well. And he said he took a stereo mix to a local studio, ran it through a nice mic preamp, not sure whether to do that but and did a little bit of EQ on compression and that was the mastering. So there you go. It's a pretty straightforward approach all round. I like this idea of having a straightforward approach. Let's have a listen to the song. When the sun gets low John Deere cap and I have a grin A checkered boy I'm almost cooking and it's all And it was summertime King pose kicking up dust Down some gravel road A bottle of coke when the road gets cold Back porch sit when the sun gets low Seventeen I got a little too tall Grandpa said but I guess I learned to get exactly And it was summertime King pose kicking up dust Down some gravel road A bottle of coke when the road gets cold Back porch sit when the sun gets low Left to so My time comes and I cross that line Know it's gonna be summertime Gonna be summertime King pose kicking up dust Down some gravel road A bottle of coke when the road gets cold Back porch sit when the sun gets low Summertime King pose kicking up dust Down some gravel road A bottle of coke when the road gets cold Back porch sit when the sun gets low Thanks so much to Gary for submitting that song Summertime and I'm going to go to a man Who's applauding there Right away he's drawn me in with his applauding Oh man I've got to say I just love that From top to bottom What a writer And the performance as well man It was all of it All of it was there And it's just proof that the whole music scene It's driven towards collecting technology And all of that And that chord D8 did its job in capturing that lovely performance And that great song by Doug We should have heard of him already In online speed It was fantastic And you know sometimes Even if it ain't your bag Yeah You've got to recognise Because that was happening on every level The only minor minor break that I've got with it Is that if the guitar was just a little bit lower So we could hear more of him Pose It was a beautiful performance I really like that We really really like that Well done Doug Beautiful music And do you think that I'm just playing devil's advocate here What if I was to say Oh this is a demo This should have some drums and bass And I'll see you shaking No Do you think that's one of those times When you could destroy a song You could do more of it Yeah sure you could But you know Did the song work as it is now And I think the answer has to be yes It really does have to be yes It didn't need anything else To make that song work So yeah you could lay it with With you know Lush production and stuff You know put in loads of strings And then maybe put in you know A steel guitar and it to give it a bit more of this It just didn't need it And the video Kind of helped with that as well Because it gives us a simple setting And the focus was on him And the song that you know That the story was telling the song So I totally get that Yeah he's a genius He's the one who did Well done Doug We don't like to see this on the show We don't like to see too much love for a song Because then there's nothing to learn from it So thanks Gary for creating such a great song But if anyone's going to be devil's advocate I think it would have to be Mr Dan here the Lonely Rocker Well I had a good sleep during that song I'm just kidding I'm just kidding No I think it's a lovely song I think to me songwriting is the process In capturing the sincerity of an artist So either you're truly sincere Or you're good at creating the feeling of sincerity One or the other And I felt sincerity in that track Man and his guitar Even a thing like I don't know if it was on purpose Or it was just a limitation of production Is that harmony was sort of sitting right behind It was just there That you could You know it wasn't like Hand differently Or it was like trying to be this other vocal It was like Squash right into the main vocal Hiding behind just this little soft voice Behind the main vocal I found myself listening for it at once Is it a female? Is it him? I definitely think it was him But I liked it It just had this really interesting effect I mean a song where I mean the chord progression has probably been Used a million times before You know there's nothing original About the chord progression But he has the ability to tell a story And it just Captured in essence there's a warmth to the track Yeah, it's simple There's not a lot in there So in terms of mixing it There's not much to mix But it sounded good It felt good And like I said It just a great delivery And to answer your question About adding more production I think that would remove some of the sincerity That I'm feeling from Because I think if you throw a full band in there Now you just have this You know tried and true chord progression That every artist in their uncle has used in the past And suddenly it's that song again Where in this case He was telling It was his way of telling his story And he had a capo there So he transposed it a little bit You know by the side from that Yeah, I got to pick up on that That's the guitar snobbery Coming out there again Oh he used the capo He used the capo No, no, I mean he transposed the key That was the difference But I Because electric guitarists They get funny about capos Ask acoustic guitar players We're like yeah Chuck a capo And change the key Electric guitarists Should be transposing that up the neck Electric guitar players are like capos Because we don't want to scratch the finish And I badly at least agree that they're called capos And not capos That's a nice thing Yeah, I agree with you guys What this made me think about And I was pondering on this Is it teased up with a little experience I've had Because during the past week I've been recording a demo for a video I'm making So I've got this microphone that I'm reviewing It's an AKG C12 clone Made here in Australia By an Australian company But much much cheaper than the C12 Which the C12 is like probably about I don't know $12,000 or something if you want to buy one This is like a $500 clone of it Which I'm really interested So as the demo I thought Well I'm going to do everything with it I'm going to record a male vocal, female vocal Acoustic guitar I'm going to mic up the bass cab I'm going to mic up the electric guitar cab with it And I wanted something in there So of course I pulled out the whole cajon And I miked that up I mean one microphone on a cajon Just seeing what I can do with one microphone In a studio Nothing else for like a full production And so that's taken away Steered me away from any virtual instruments And I'd normally probably would have gone to Virtual instruments for some of this Especially for the drums And when I'm listening to the mix at the moment I haven't finished mixing it But I'm like This sounds really really good And I was thinking Maybe that's because There's no real opportunity to quantize it I've got to get things right With just that microphone It's like playing a real piece of music There's nothing virtual about it So it makes me wonder If even the act of using something Like a Korg D8 You know no built-in virtual instruments No quantizing You just it's like using an old tape recorder Except it's digital You just got to perform You know go for it And so I'm going to suggest everyone goes out And buys a digital recorder Or discipline themselves maybe Just as an experiment as I have And use their door as if it's a digital recorder Don't use all the tricks in it And have a go at just recording something As if it's a tape recorder Let me know what you think Actually it's funny you should mention that Mike Because I think my most productive days We're probably using those digital hard disc recorders And I have D24 in a cupboard somewhere And I have three 3 prospects DA is a wicked machines I did some of the best work that I've done On those machines And you know I kind of miss those days Because you were much more focused on listening To what you were doing Rather than looking at the computer screen As it is these days So they have life left in them I think Zoe would have just bought out a new one actually I do think there's some people's brains And we all think in a different way And there's some people I try to help people Get into doors Many people on my channel It's a very typical story They've been away raising kids for 20 years And now they've come back to recording But when they meet a door They go this is confusing You know perhaps they're not that computer literate That's not the way they think And I think hopefully that I'm able on the channel And people like Dan are able to help people Cross over that area of difficulty they're getting to But there are some people who never gels with them They just they need a piece of hardware They need some knobs and sliders in front of them The computer thing just doesn't work for them So I think they're great from that perspective So Iqorg you said you had a D24 Is that a 24 track recorded? Yeah D24 24 yeah We might be able to now Pop it on eBay just after the show We've talked them up so No I can't Iqorg I cannot force myself to sell it I just love those machines And I'm just thinking you know If I change my mind I've still got them I probably won't but they're they're wicked machines So did they have a built-in CD burner on that? We were talking about a CD or was it just a hard one? No they didn't have a built-in CD burner No actually wait a minute If you put a do no you couldn't no no not that model Not that model But it sounds like you've got a few you mentioned You had a FosTechs and stuff I'm thinking maybe you should open a museum Maybe That could be a new money's been a few Ricky But you're right because I've got a couple of D8Bs knocking about as well So yeah you might be right Where do you have the space man? Do you have an attic full of stuff or something like that? I think those two are in a bag under the bed Any burglars think you're going to Ricky's house You don't need the ladder for the attic Just under the bed Yeah Not much else to say about the song I obviously as soon as I heard the song I thought This is a good example of songwriting I mentioned to Gary in a little chat I was having with him I could get into trouble for saying this I'm not a big sort of country music listener And I could hear plenty of country contemporary country in there So but I think that's a good thing I think if I if I'm enjoying a song even though it's not a genre that I I listen to a lot or particularly drawn to Then that's a really good sign To cross over that line you go Because I was drawn into the story actually I was drawn into the whole story of his His grandfather and everything in that whole thing And you know what summertime meant and some of the things And there was a couple of killer lines in there as well Which is always good to have So yeah well done on that Thank you so much to the people who have been in the chat Listening along with us And also letting us know what you think I just see in there Keonra was saying that She was thinking of doing similar Turning off the metronome And turning off some of the VST She was saying it out of the comment It's a really good exercise to do I've started many many a song Not used recording a metronome By just playing an acoustic guitar As the basis for the whole song And I do a couple of videos about How you can actually subsequently and most stores Make the tempo track Or the metronome in other words Fit that instrument I've done that many times And I feel it works So I've just started off with that acoustic guitar Played the song as I think it should be With all those subtle tempo changes That we have when we organically play music Which a form of expression in my opinion And you can actually make the door Play along with that once you've recorded it And then if you need to do a bit of Copying and pasting or quantising of things It will quantise to that organic tempo track There's ways of doing that So don't think you always have to switch on a metronome And play along with that Some music in my opinion You definitely shouldn't do that There's some songs you definitely Should not play along with a metronome So don't think there's any rule there But yeah How about you Dan I mean your style of music Is so organic really It's really your style of music That sort of rock genre Doesn't want to be sounding robotic It wants to be very, very expressive So do you always use a metronome Or do you do the same sometimes Well this is interesting topic because Because I basically make music by myself I rarely use I mean I have some drummers that I know I have to track But when I'm recording I'm using virtual drums Only because I don't have anything else I play bass, I play guitar, I play some keyboard I play a bit of drums But not good enough for the type of music that I'm playing So I'm forced to use virtual drums Which means I'm now working on that grid That creates those drums I have songs I've written That I've been working on How to record that were Written on acoustic guitar That have tempo shifts And stuff like that So I've been giving thought And that would probably be done without a metronome And if I do build into a part Where maybe it ends with full instrumentation Then maybe I'll record that separately With the virtual drums And then stitch them together To build up to that point But I do miss that And I think it's become a challenge for some players Because when you're working on the grid all the time And then now you're forced to be off the grid It's actually different And I noticed that when I brought a live drummer Into one of my tracks recently And feeling that natural pulse The human pulse It was nice I actually had to go back Because he actually played to a track I had already recorded I actually went back and re-recorded all my parts To play to that real drum And I think it made the song a lot better It's exactly what I'm intending on this song I'm recording at the moment with Ed Thorn I recorded all the parts Which was you know Me and Susie singing Some acoustic guitars Some electric guitars Some bass It, keeping in mind I'm doing this for Ed as a demo So that he can play his drum part But I'm going to record All the other instruments again Afterwards sort of properly in quotes Given that I've now got that pulse Of a real drummer behind the track So they'll be interesting in that experience I want to say to people in the audience This is a good thing to do There's quite a number of people who offer services On last week's show If you would go back and watch that I know one of the artists mentioned that They used a remote drummer A service I think they paid $45 or something Crazily cheap like that And this drummer you know Just heard the song And sent them back the multi-tracks I've recently used Ed Thorn Who's a guest on the show And I know that Someone who's a guest And often in the chat of the show Jade Star also plays drums And sometimes provides drum backing tracks for people So you know There's people you can reach out to In this community of ours It's going to be a really interesting thing to do If you've always only used virtual drums Which I'm going to guess 95% of people Who watch our channels do But the internet's got so much more efficient now Speeds are quicker You can send bigger files You know all that great stuff So you know It's actually the tools are there For us to be able to collaborate together Rather than always being lonely rockers Or lonely jazzers Or lonely Or lonely Aussies But yeah How about you Ricky Do you always use virtual drums Or still sometimes work with drummers or I'm Trump I think I'm quite confident With realistic drum programming However If you were talking about guitars For example I'd say yeah My buddy over there He's given me some tough tracks And so yeah And the thing was You know originally The songs that I all stand to play on They had They had cookie cutter guitars on there So I'm listening back to this It needs a real thing So Dan Put his work on there And it glued it all together So I'll be damned If anybody can tell the difference That you see Yeah look I mean I promote Virtual guitars on the channel all the time You know I've got a great relationship With Ample Sound Who makes some fantastic instruments In terms of virtual guitars And but my position always is Is that they're getting They're getting better They're getting there Now I think at this stage It's up to the programmer or player To educate themselves In how to use these tools And make it as realistic as possible But of course I'm a guitarist And I would never ever use a virtual guitar Instead of playing the guitar for me Because first of all it's easier It's a lot of hard work Programming virtual guitars It's really if you want to make them sound good And you can It's just the nature of them You can never quite make it sound There's so many articulations on a guitar There's so many different ways To articulate things on a guitar And they approach that But you can never ever Quite reach it with a virtual guitar The subtleties in there are just too subtle But good on the sound for trying And they make great effort in trying I have to say We have these conversations because The technology went in that direction Is that someone decided like Oh if you don't know how to do it We'll find a way to do it for you Like we get to these discussions about samples I always look at samples as sounds That a keyboard player would use So it was a real musician playing samples Through the performance through a keyboard I think the discussion that we should have more often Than samples is pre-packaged loops So ample sound has got a MIDI I don't know how it works I don't use it But I assume you could however you enter Your MIDI information If you're a kick-ass keyboard player You could plug in and have the sound for the darn thing And come up with something to do with it But me you're still a musician You're utilizing sounds But you're still playing the parts That's where I have the problem Is that musicians or today's musicians Who want to be musicians And feel they don't need to know how to play music New samples, they're great But play the music That's where the soul of that Can I just say quickly why you say that Dan I just want to quickly do a bit of a shout out I know he probably won't be watching But there's a channel called Hi-Fi MIDI And he liked me if there's an ample sound new release He will be talking about the new We've, us YouTubers have always got those other channels Where we always seem to be releasing the same Products as one or other Reviews of products with one or other But Hi-Fi MIDI, I'm so jealous of him Because what he is, he's not a guitar player But he's a fantastic keyboard player So when you watch his videos He does live, you know He just does it live And he plays ample sound stuff And he can make it sound good I have to kind of program it a little bit Because I'm just not good enough on the keyboard to do it But yeah, folks, if you check out that channel If you're interested in this subject Hi-Fi MIDI, he's a keyboard player Who kind of promotes virtual instruments, I suppose And, but like me tries to say Well, if you are going to use them At least use them well And learn about the original instruments And how they work And how, you know, what their limitations are And that, so yeah I just wanted to do a shout out to Hi-Fi MIDI there Because he's got a great channel Which I often watch and love Guys, I think we have to wind it down now We've done an hour and 20 minutes Thank you so much for the people in the chat who have been here If you're watching on the replay Do not forget to like And subscribe if you haven't already subscribed Check out the links in the description down below For my wonderful guests Dan the Lonely Rock and Ricky T Brown From Home Recording Studio Zone And definitely, and I think People do not do this enough People don't follow the links in the description For the artists Please support the artists If you'd like to be supported yourself Then do, you know, pay it forward As a word You know, do the same in court Go and listen to their music Listen to their other tracks If there's links to their other music Follow up Encourage them Give them your insights If you think they could do for With some constructive criticism On their mixes or what have you Then go ahead and do that as well Take an interest in other people's music It will help you to grow as a musician And that's what this show is all about I'm going to leave the last word For this show today To the wisest person on my right Ricky T Brown Oh my lord Thank you everybody Thank you everybody for joining us this week And make sure you put a big fat like Okay See you


So how'd you arrive at the decision to go back to retire? To talk to my wife. We had a lot of long discussions, kind of made a list. Reasons to keep going, reasons to not keep going, and just kind of really hashed it out and really talked about it for a while and just came to the decision. I thought it was the right time. What did you share with the team and the defensive unit this morning and the meeting? Well, I told, first of all, I thanked all the guys on the team for allowing me to be here and coach, which leads me to, I want to thank Mr. Blank, Rich McKay, Terry Fontenot, obviously Coach Smith for those guys all giving me the opportunity. It's a first class organization. I really didn't know much about the Falcons. I knew, I told you I came here a long time ago, or when I first got here because of Coach Smith, but didn't know really a lot about the Falcons. Absolutely a first class organization. And I've been blessed that every organization I've worked with has been that way. England, Baltimore, Tennessee, and here. I'm just very blessed and privileged to have worked for all four of them. And I can't say enough good things about all of them. Head coaches, front office, everybody, but especially here. And I'm very grateful I got the opportunity to come here. I told, I shared with the team the reasons why I'm not coming back and then I am going to retire. But first of all, I told them the hardest decision was not seeing them and being around the team. I love this defense. Where they've come from the beginning of this year to where they are now, I've never had a defense do that. In this last nine games, we've given up an average of 314 yards a game and 19.7 points a game, which would be fifth in the NFL right now. Unfortunately, it's not the way it is because we played the first eight games, and we weren't that way. But to know that a team can improve that much and has improved that much and was bought in that much is just really tremendous. I just can't say enough good things about them. We went from 28th in the league in red zone to 14th. If you look, I think the final product was one of the things that I heard so much about at Atlanta defense when I came here was not finishing games. That was always the big push. We ended this year in second half points, second in the league. Behind Buffalo, by 1 tenth of a point. And so I'd say that's a pretty good tribute to those young men. And so like I say, that's the first thing I started out with. Second thing was, like I said, it was my reasons. And number one was the fact that there comes a point in time. I've been in this thing so long and been around so many players that extended their careers just a hair too long. Guys that have had incredible careers and at the end, maybe they've lost a little bit and they started to drift or lost speed or whatever it is physically and then maybe end up with not as good an ending. And that's what kind of people think about them and it's tragic to me because they had such great careers. Right now, my ego and my heart tell me to stay. But my mind and my body told me it's time. And that meaning that there are some things this year. I caught a cold in Los Angeles, which is what the second game of the season. I got over December 20th.  A lot less sleep. All those things were a factor. And I think I still maintained an OK attitude and good job with the game plan and stuff like that and working hard and all that stuff. But the hours, when you get to a certain age, it's hard to put in 85 hours a week. It is. And so I don't want to be. And I think this thing is trending in such a great direction. I don't want to be a deterrent if something does start to. If I start to fade, I don't want to be a deterrent to this defense or to this team.  I have another year on my contract.  Was this your plan all along? No, because I got three years on my contract. I got another year if I wanted it. So that's not even close to being the case. So it's just that I thought of that. That was one of the biggest reasons. The second one is, because of those things, also I owe it to my wife and my family to give them time. And you never know at this age how much longer you have. And I just really weighed on me that my family has sacrificed so much. My wife has sacrificed so much for my career. And I know she'd like to travel. We wanted to travel after the Tennessee thing and COVID hit. And so we didn't have that opportunity. The other thing is, I've lost a couple of coaching friends this last year that had retired. That bothered me a little. At what point in time do you not try to fulfill some things that you want to do with your family? I got a bunch of grandsons that are all playing football now and stuff and other sports. And I want to watch them. Sometimes I didn't get to see my own kids play very much because of this professional.  But my wife has sacrificed so much. And she will do and she has done whatever I wanted to do. This was our decision, but it was still my decision. She would never, ever tell me that she once made a retire. She won't disagree with wanting me to retire, but she would never tell me that. And obviously, that's true because I went back out of retirement twice and she approved of it. So I just, those were the two biggest reasons. I just feel like I do not want to be a detriment. I don't think I am, but I don't want to be. And I, like I say, I've seen it enough that I don't want to be that guy. And so I'm not going to be. It's plain and simple.  But that lasted pretty much the entire season. At what point did you start thinking, OK, this might be the last year? Not till the end. Not till the very end. It wasn't like, it's just at some point in time, you just got to kind of sit down and say, OK, I told you, I really usually reassess everything at the end of the season. And that's what I did. It was the end of the season.  I told you, I'd assess it after the season. But the other part of that was that I think I also, I also know how this coaching carousel goes. And I don't know how many jobs we got open today, like five head coaching jobs, a couple coordinator jobs, all this kind of stuff. I also don't think it's fair to Coach Smith that I would hang on and say, OK, well, I'm going to take some time and think about this after the season. That's not fair. Make a decision so that he can make a decision. And that's the way it should work.  Well, it's the same thing if you're an assistant coach. You ought to tell the head coach if you're not coming back right away. So I felt like after the game, I didn't want, I wanted to have an opportunity, too, to address the players. And if all of a sudden, everybody's out of the building after today, I'd have to do it through text or email. I want to actually tell them physically. I don't like texting. I don't like telling people over the phone. I want to tell you in person what I think and how I feel. And to me, that's the most genuine way to do it. And I've been that way with thousands of players that I've coached. I want to tell them in person. I don't want to tell them by text or email or something else. So Mel and I just kind of decided over the weekend, right before the game, that let's make a decision we did. When you look back at five decades, what stands out? People, players, that's why you do it. I sure didn't make any money early on as a high school coach or even as a college coach back in the day. I certainly wasn't about the money. It's all about people. It's about players. It's about coaches and so should I. I have so many friends and so many people. I'm getting so many texts from guys all the way back to high school. Guys played for me in high school. It's really just that's the memories. And you know what, it's not, you know, it's always everybody puts up there, the accolades, the awards, the Super Bowls, that stuff. It's really not that. And I know everybody's the way it's easy for you to say, no, because those things are important. Those things are, you like those. You work hard to try to achieve those things. But the biggest achievements have been some of the things that guys that never played professional football played for me in college or even in high schools that have gone on to achieve things. And maybe they didn't have a dad or they didn't have, you know, they had a tough life at home and you made things better for them. And they appreciate that.  All worthwhile. And we talked a lot about the players that you've worked with. But what about those coaches who you've worked with and influenced and have now? Well, I hope I've been influenced. I know I've worked with them, but you'd have to ask them if I actually influenced them. But it is kind of neat to look around and see, I don't know, there's like eight or nine coordinators here in the league that all worked for me at some point in time, a couple of head coaches. It's great to see them. It's great to see them have success. And I wish them the best. And I keep watching them all the time and always keep track of them. We talk a lot unless we're going to play each other. And it's just been the camaraderie of this profession. And it's kind of crazy because you always see, you guys probably all see coaches standing out talking to each other before the game. Now, we want to whoop them when it goes. You know, I mean, it's like yesterday I was talking to Tom before the game. Well, I have a great feeling for Tom. About six years, coaching with him, I've played against him 10, now 11 times. And five and six, unfortunately. So, but I'm probably not alone in that category, I would guess. But the point of it is, is that I have a great feeling for him, but also he wanted to whip me and I wanted to whip him.  That's why you just, to me, it's a fraternity. Like the players have a fraternity, the coaches kind of have a fraternity. We all understand that their sacrifice and their families are sacrificing the same thing your sacrifice and in the hours that you're putting in. But I'm very, it also tells you, I think, a little bit by those guys all being coordinators and those guys that we hired some pretty good people.  I think I went through five secondary coaches when I was at Baltimore as a coordinator and all five of them left to become coordinators. All left for good reasons. Nobody getting fired. Everybody left to be the next step up. That's a great thing. That's a great thing. And the next guy we hired was there one year and he was a coordinator. So those are all positives about this profession.  When you first got here to now, how would you say the culture of this defense change from your arrival? I think incredible. I attribute that to the coaches. Coach Smith's starting at the top, but especially the defensive coaches too. Everybody bought in, but the players also bought in. Because you gotta get them, it was a different system than what they had. And so you gotta get them to buy in. And that first year, they all bought in. I just don't think we had, we couldn't do a lot of the stuff that we really wanted to do, because you gotta learn it. It's not an easy system. It's just not. It takes a while to learn it. And so, but then this last year at the beginning of the season, we just did some crazy things. They were much more in tune. I told you that during training camp. I told you that someday I want this defense to be talked about like the other defenses that I've been around. And now I think they are that. I mean, I really believe one of the things I wanted to achieve personal goal was that every place I've been, I've had a top 10 defense. And I wanted to have a top 10 defense here. And now I think there is a top 10 defense. They were the second half of the year. This was a top 10 defense. And so I feel good about that.  And it takes a toll on you. You just get tired of watching that score up there. And there's the three point difference and you had a chance to maybe win the game on one player or the other. And that takes a toll. But these guys come back in there on Wednesday and when I talk to them or have a signal callers meeting, here we go again. And bought right into what we wanted to do. And it just really paid off. And like I say, I just, I couldn't be prouder of that group of men. Retired, you stayed in the game, kind of in doing the radio show? Radio. I was never a media guy though. I was never, I was never, I was never part of the media. Let it go. Do you want to stay in football right now or is this a clean break for you? I think it's a very clean break. Although I will always say never. My wife says, yeah, sure. And so some other people have too, but yeah, sure, you're retired. But it won't be as a coach. And I'll say that I'm done coaching. And I don't want, I don't want to do anything that's going to require. I told you the main reason I want to spend time with my family and my wife and do those things. And so I'm not going to do anything that requires time like that. And so I just, I mean, some high school coach wanted me to come over and talk to the team or come over something. Yeah, I might do that or something. I don't know, but I, because I don't want to say I'd never do that, but I'm not coaching. I'm done. I'm done. And really, I'm not cut out for really the radio show or what you guys do because I just, I probably, they wouldn't like what I had to say. So. As the season went it down, a lot of the guys started talking about the camaraderie, the defense, right? Even someone in locker room said, like compared it to a college locker room, what was it about this squad you said you loved them? What was it about the squad that just made them so special? I think because we tried to make it fun. You know, sometimes it's kind of, everybody says, why do you do so much? You know, there is a couple of reasons. And one of them everybody thinks was because you want to be so different for the offense that you're playing and stuff. You know, there's another part of it is, I don't want to be bored. I don't want to be bored. I thought up stuff every week just because I wanted to think stuff up. It kept me mentally sharp, you know, of just, okay, how can I do this? We ran a package yesterday that we had not run all year and there were five calls out of it on the last game of the season against Tom Brady. And it was all pressure. I don't know if you watched yesterday, we pressured 32 times out of 55 plays. And it was a whole new look that nobody had ever seen. Why do it on the 17th game, especially if you think you're retiring and what makes a difference? Because I want it to be fresh. And you know what, those guys had fun with it all week because it's not boring. It's got, you got to learn something new and you're always learning and you're always keeping it fresh. And it's not like, okay, well we're going to go out there and play Tampa 2 today. Great. Oh, that's a lot of fun. No, you want to come out there. And part of that is that is it was similar calls but out of a whole different front. And those guys think, oh, yeah, this will be great. And they were coming off the sideline, talking about it. Oh yeah, I was free. I was free. Asking these guys, okay, who blocked you on that? And they're so into it because that's what makes defense fun is just going and having fun and doing new things. And I think that's why we tried doing it all pretty much all year. And we've always kind of tried to do it. But the first part of it is you got to lay a foundation so they actually know what you're talking about. Then you can start changing things up. And the last half of the season, we changed things up. We'd go in and a half time and come up and change things up. And obviously they work. But these guys then started believing that like one of the things yesterday they go, we'll shut them out second half. They ain't scoring a second half. Well, they didn't. And so they start believing that stuff in it. That just makes it much, much more fun. And there isn't any, I mean, if you guys watch, there ain't a lot of hooting and hollering. I ain't not ripping anybody on the sideline. Coaches aren't ripping anybody on the sideline even if they make a mistake. Here's how we'll fix it. And so to me, it was coaching positive. And coaches, all of our coaches coached positive. And I think those guys loved that and had fun with it. At least I hope they did. Talking on Friday about you and you was saying that you've had a tremendous impact on the game and on the people that you've worked with. Do you think about your legacy in that way in terms of impact on the game? I asked about coaches before, but just like generally what you've been able to achieve and the impact that you've had? No, I really don't. The best example of that was a year ago, I asked Dick LeBeau for his autograph. And he goes, why are you asking me? I said, well, you've done this. What do you think you've done? And that meant a lot to me. But I don't see myself in that light at all. Tried to do my job, tried to do it honestly, tried to be loyal to all the guys that I've worked for. I've told you guys in the past, I think one of the reasons I've never been fired is I've never looked for a job. I got a job, that's the job I gotta do. I'm happy with it, I'm happy where I am. I'm not trying to all of a sudden jump the wagon and go see, think grass is green or somewhere else. I've not applied for jobs. Didn't apply for this one, didn't apply for Tennessee, didn't apply for Baltimore, didn't apply for New England. Those were all jobs that somebody, they called me and asked me if I'd be interested. Absolutely, I'd be interested and it worked out. But I think also the head coaches appreciated the fact that I wasn't out ever looking for another job. I was asked at Baltimore about a head coaching job once, not interested, don't wanna have any interest in it, don't wanna be a head coach, happy doing what I'm doing. Been out of the 50 years I've been coaching, I've been a coordinator, signal caller, 44 of them. And so happy doing that to me, that was the head coaching gig I was made out to, or I was head coaching college, wasn't always cracked up to be. And I could all of a sudden, you're not the same person, you can't deal with the players on the same personal relationship, you have to make hard decisions, I don't have to make a hard decision, I don't cut anybody, I don't talk about contracts with anybody, I don't talk to anybody about anything other than football and players. And so to me, that's, hopefully that's the influence that I've had because I tried to be honest and upfront with everybody. I know you always talked a lot about timeline a little bit. Dude, what happened this year in New Orleans and anything for you? No, not really, no, no. It was funny yesterday, I'll tell you a quick story. It can be yesterday, I always tell you a quick story.  I mean, I haven't seen him, I hadn't talked to him. I said, yeah, I'm pretty good, it's not, it didn't really affect me too much.  Let's have some fun with it. No, I just tell all the old guys out there, I can still take a hit. So that's all matters.