Anatomy of a Grammy-Award Nominated Country Song

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE: Chris Young and Cassadee Pope’s smash #1 hit duet “Think of You” was recently nominated for a 2017 Grammy Award in the Best Country Duo/Group Performance. The song soared to the top of the Billboard Country Airplay chart in May and earned a nomination for Musical Event of the Year at the 2016 Country Music Awards. Clearly, clever songwriting and heartfelt performances made the song the wonder that it is, but credit must also be given to famed mix engineer Billy Decker, whose efforts have earned him eleven number one songs and sales of over 25 million RIAA-certified albums. Like every song Decker mixes, Metric Halo plug-ins featured prominently in “Think of You” and allowed the artistry of the creation to shine to its fullest potential.

SAFETY HARBOR, FLORIDA: Before 2013, Rob Caggiano was perhaps best known as the guitarist for American heavy metal behemoth Anthrax, a position he resigned in 2013 on good terms to follow his passion and broaden his horizon musically. Although it wasn’t part of any kind of premeditated plan, Caggiano almost immediately joined the Danish heavy metal behemoth Volbeat and has remained with the band since, not only to shred their solos, but also to write solos and songs of his own with them. What’s not so well known is that Caggiano won both positions as a producer and engineer and that he continues to bring great music into the world in that capacity with his trusty – and extremely portable – Metric Halo ULN-8 interface. “It’s an entire studio in one rack space!” Caggiano said.

In this article, we’ll take a look at a standout performer: the Metric Halo Precision DeEsser. Of all the many de-esser plug-ins I’ve used over the years, Precision DeEsser has, by far, the most comprehensive and effective facilities for zeroing in on sibilance while retaining a vocal track’s presence and air.

- Michael Cooper
Electronic Musician Magazine
Feb. 2017 Edition

ONLINE NOW!  Please click the link to read the full article: Electronic Musician Magazine Sibilance Smackdown!

Or, buy a copy of Electronic Musician Magazine (February 2017 Edition), on newsstands NOW.

SAFETY HARBOR, FLORIDA: After less than a decade in the business, Chris Sclafani’s results-oriented, artist-centered approach has made him an in-demand recording and mix engineer. His client list includes Selena Gomez, The Weeknd, Gwen Stefani, Sean Paul, and Passion Pit, among many others. More recently, he has worked with Ed Sheeran on Divide, Ariana Grande on Cashmere Cat’s album 9, and Camila Cabello on the single, “Cryin’ in the Club.” After cutting great vocals, guitars, drums, and other instruments with Ed Sheeran (which earned an Album of the Year Grammy Award nomination in 2015 for X), Ed asked him to set up his home studio. Among many other things, Sclafani gave Sheeran a copy of Metric Halo’s legendary ChannelStrip plug-in, which has been Sclafani’s go-to for “literally everything involving vocals and most other things as well.”

SAFETY HARBOR, FLORIDA: Michelle Chamuel is perhaps best known as the charismatic runner-up on season four of NBC’s The Voice, where her amazing performance of Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble,” earned high praise from Swift herself and chart position on the Billboard Hot 100! But Chamuel’s obvious talent for captivating audiences with her singing voice and relatable personality is really just one talent among many. She is a capable multi-instrumentalist, an impassioned songwriter, and a uniquely creative producer. Her production alias, The Reverb Junkie is an obvious tech-head nod to her love of manipulated sound. Since her early involvement in the band Ella Riot and her appearances on The Voice, Chamuel has released three pop-focused albums/EPs under her own name, Face the Fire, The Drift, and Feel It, and three experimentally-focused albums/EPs under The Reverb Junkie moniker, All I Want, EP 2, and I Am. Throughout, she has relied on her Metric Halo 2882 converter and Metric Halo ChannelStrip plug-in to faithfully capture and create her expansive universe of sounds.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Dropping his tone as one might in conversation with a co-conspirator, TV composer Jonathan Thomas Miller seemed to almost confess: “The speed of my delivery is crazy. I’m writing, recording, and mixing three to four pieces a day. I gotta crank it out!” But don’t get the wrong idea; he wasn’t complaining. Miller loves the challenge and constraints of his business, which he’s been building for nearly two decades.

After happily spending “forever” in school in his native Ohio and Michigan, Miller took the musical plunge in 2000 and moved to Los Angeles to serve as an assistant to Tom Hiel, composer for ABC’s The Practice, which gave him an inside view of the industry and plenty of practice (ha!) mixing. A sequence of happy accidents presented him with the opportunity to write the theme for Discovery Channel’s Big!, which led to extended gigs on shows like Flip That House (89 episodes), Verminators (26 episodes), Oddities (42 episodes), Wild Justice (31 episodes), 1000 Ways to Die (76 episodes), and Jay Leno’s Garage (16 episodes and counting), among many, many others. In total, Miller estimates that he has written 6,000-7,000 pieces!

SZEGED, HUNGARY: Metric Halo user and Hungarian Biophysical researcher, Dr. Tibor László Páli, M.Sc., C.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc. (T.P.) mentions using Metric Halo ULN-8 and SpectraFoo for the digital signal processing and analysis in the recently published scientific article: Ferencz, C.-M. et al. Oscillating Electric Field Measures the Rotation Rate in a Native Rotary Enzyme. Sci. Rep. 7, 45309; doi: 10.1038/srep45309 (2017).

As Dr. Páli shared with the Metric Halo MIO Users Group, "Out of my ~100 scientific papers this high impact report is the first one, in which I mention using Metric Halo products in biophysical research. The paper is about exposing a protein to AC electric field with frequencies in the audio range." Dr. Páli continued, "In this paper MIOs and 'Foo had simple tasks, but more to come from my research group."

Metric Halo thanks Dr. Páli for mentioning Metric Halo in the scientific paper, and congratulates him and fellow researchers on the paper's recent publication in Nature.

Link to Scientific Paper: http://rdcu.be/qo1D

About the Mobile I/O Users Group

The oldest and most active community is the user-administered Mobile I/O Users Mailing list hosted by the Music Department at Virginia Tech. You can subscribe to the list via its Portal Page. Once you have registered, you can also access the list archives. It was originally initiated on Yahoo by Steve Hilmy, and is now Moderated by Hiro Honshuku.

(From left to right) Robert Walsh, Chicago Music Library; Stan Lee, creator of X-Men, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain America; and Stan Lee’s producer, Tony Pastor, Marvel Animation.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA: Chicago Music Library has over 60,000 tracks ready to license, and it services all the major television and movie studios, and ad agencies in Hollywood, New York, and (of course!) Chicago, and in over sixty countries worldwide. With over 10,000 European Classical Orchestral Master recordings, the Chicago Music Library also has one of the world’s largest catalogs of classical music. It’s team of composers and engineers is constantly producing new tracks, and they rely on Metric Halo ChannelStrip to give the tracks a professional polish using an intuitive interface that makes it easy to get the right sound quickly and intuitively.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE: With three Grammy Awards under his belt, David Garcia continues to challenge himself by stretching his songwriting and production craft into new genres. He won the ASCAP Christian Songwriter of the Year Award in 2015 and has worked extensively with Christian hip-hop act TobyMac, Christian pop act Britt Nicole, Christian indie rock act MercyMe, and Christian rapper NF. Garcia relocated from his native Florida to Nashville in 2009 and, in the spirit of that move, recently started working with country singer Kip Moore, who – despite the middle name “Christian” – is not an explicitly Christian act. Their single, “More Girls Like You,” is charting as of this writing and was co-written, produced, recorded, and mixed by Garcia. As always, Garcia relied on Metric Halo’s ChannelStrip plug-in to compress, limit, and equalize many tracks of the song.

(PHOTO CREDIT: ©2017 Dan Thompson)

“ChannelStrip is my default EQ. It’s always right there, and it’s the first thing I think of... I can't live without it."

- Rick Carson, Mix Engineer, Record Producer
Make Believe Studios

OMAHA, NEBRASKA: “I have a goal: I want to help create a body of work in my lifetime, and I want at least one song to last in the public consciousness for 100 years!” So, says Rick Carson, engineer and visionary who got into recording at 14, realized it was his life’s passion, and graduated from Full Sail as the school’s youngest graduate. He was just 17 years old! After paying his dues in post-production and recording facilities in both Prague and Chicago, Carson did some disciplined market research and determined that the population of one million in greater Omaha, Nebraska had an abundance of bands and a dearth of studios to record them. Six years ago, he opened Make Believe Studios there. He has since poured “every cent, every second, every ounce of effort” in pursuit of his life’s dream and ultimate goal. In that time, he has engineered Grammy-nominated projects and has a client list that includes Robert Searight, Terrace Martin, Problem, Danny Warsnop, and The Ready Set, among many others.