TSRB 127 - Automatic Episode Transcript — Please excuse any errors, not reviewed for accuracy

Benedikt: Dave gro or John Bonham. 

Myk: Hmm.

That's a tough call to make. So. I'm gonna make up my own answer for this one and say their baby 

Benedikt: Hello, and welcome to the self recording band podcast. I am your host Benedictine. And today I am joined by the one and only Mike Robinson. Mike is an engineer, producer, musician, and content creator from west Tennessee United States. Um, he's built a pretty cool resource for reproduces primarily or Reaper users primarily. it's a YouTube channel called let's talk about Reaper. And also if I'm, if my information is correct, it's also a discord, server, like the unofficial Reaper users group on discord and from like people in our audience, uh, they've requested you Mike, a couple of times now you were one of the guests that they definitely wanted to have on the podcast because we have a lot of reer users in our audience. So I'm really, really happy and grateful for you taking the time. I really appreciate that though. So thank you for coming onto this podcast. And, uh,

Myk: Thanks for having me and I am, uh, I am absolutely flattered and overwhelmed that anybody even asked for me. So thanks for having me here

Benedikt: Yeah. Thank you for taking the time. Yeah, absolutely. I've asked a couple of times, like who I, who we should interview, which I wanted to bring more people onto the podcast, uh, instead of just doing our episodes and yeah, you were the, one of the, the, the most requested people actually, and I think. This is also, I mean, this is due to the fact that you're a phenomenal teacher, I believe, but also due to the fact that a lot of self recording bands and artists happen to use Reaper. And the thing is my cohost and I, we don't use Reaper. I've, I've tried it, I have it on my computer, but I don't know a lot about it. So I'm really, really glad that you came on to teach us a few things about it, maybe. 

Myk: Yeah. We'll make a convert out of you yet. That

Benedikt: we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. So that's, that's, uh, that's hopefully one of these and, and I'm pretty sure it will be one of these episodes where I can just, just learn a lot about it, a tool that I, I haven't used much. So my first question to you, Mike, would be, why was Reaper the, do that you, that you used, or like, first of all, did you start with Reaper or did you come from a completely different background and then happen to discover Reaper and transitioned?

Myk: depends on who you ask. The truth is Reaper is probably my third doll, 

but usually when I'm asked that question, I just like to skip the other two and say that I started with Reaper. So let's get into the true story. I believe if I recall my first doll was what's it called intra studio, which I found out recently is still around it's by a company called either fast, soft, or FA soft. And I liked it quite frankly, if I recall it was very similar in layout and function to Reaper, 

but this was back in the 4 86 days and I didn't have much computing power. I didn't really know what I was doing was, was just dabbling. Um, 

after that I tried, uh, what was it called? It's now Adobe audition. But before that was called. Cool, cool edit pro. Those of you who have used it, remember the barbershop quartet theme song that would play every time you opened it up. and I think I spent maybe about three and a half to five minutes in Cubase and finally settled on Reaper.

And, uh, well, uh, no, I missed one. I actually did dabble in FL studio for a short time as well. 

There, there was several that I've tried for like maybe a day or two, but I kind of don't count them.

Benedikt: Fair enough. Did you have like any, any sort of analog background or did you, did you have the, the classical I started with the four track kind of thing. Um, 

was that a thing for you? 

Myk: I have, let's see no proper studio experience whatsoever. The recording that I had before using Reaper and a computer assisted recording was strictly done on either a four track tape or, I don't know if you recall, I'm not sure your age I'll be 46 this year, so I'm kind of right at death's door. But back when I was in elementary school, they would show film strips, uh, for educational purposes and would have a little tape recorder to play the sound along with it, the kind that had to pull out handle. I'm sure you're probably familiar with them. 

Those make great recording, medium for bands. If you put it in the right corner and put enough blankets on it, to keep it from over driving the little microphone, you can get some pretty fantastic recordings by just getting the sound levels right in the room. 

But that was where I got my real start was with a little tape player

Benedikt: awesome. So, so you were actually a self recording band too, in the beginning. Like you started 

Myk: before it was cool. 

Benedikt: before it was cool.

Myk: right.

Benedikt: Yeah. So, and, and, uh, did you, what type of music did you make or do you make with your band? Like what, what's your musical background?

Myk: Um, I grew up playing in punk and metal bands. So that, you know, when most of the people around me were into R and B or pop, or what have you, I was into iron maiden and Megadeath and Metallica, and, well, that's more on the rock side of things on the punk side of things, bands like crimp shrine, black flag misfits, which are still favorites of mine.

Benedikt: Awesome. Awesome. That's, uh, definitely events I'm very familiar with because I'm come from a punk rock and hardcore background myself. So, so that's really cool. And I think it's even more interesting to hear that you've tried fel studio once, because to me, I mean, I might be completely wrong, but to me, fel studio was always one of those, like hip hop, pop sort of electronic types of Daws, like, or at least a lot of people in these genres use it. I I've, I've not seen many rock people use FFL studios though. It's kinda interesting that you tried that first 

Myk: I think I tend to agree with that assessment really is, is it does seem more geared towards that. I am a firm believer that you can do just about anything with just about any dog. It's just a matter of which one suits your workflow best because at the end of the day, a tool is a tool. And me as a consumer, very seldom questions say a construction worker as to, you know, I bet you would do a better job if he used this hammer or this screwdriver. I just trust him to do their work with whatever tools they. If

Benedikt: Yeah. That that to totally agree with that. Couldn't agree more. awesome. So, okay. So you were in a band, you were recording yourself with a tape recorder and then you moved on to four tracks and computers and all of that. Did you do that exclusively for your own band or did you pretty quickly also do it for other people? Because as if I'm, if, if I, if I'm correct there, I think now you are a producer and engineer, not only for your own band, but you do it for other artists too. And you have your, your own studio where you do that. Um, so how, how long did that transition take you and how did that go?

Myk: I'm honest, I think it's still a work in progress. I mean, I do have my studio here in my home, but I'm very selective a as to who I record because it's in my home. If the dog doesn't like you at the door, you can't come any further. and you know, it's, it's not even really something that I advertise because I started off doing this primarily, as you said, for the bands that I was playing in and just for a few friends here and there, and of course, as word gets out, people will start to, to ask and come around. But to this day, I still don't necessarily look at this as a career path, which seems weird. It's one of those things that I enjoy doing it, but at the same time, every time I sit down to do it, I get frustrated about the challenges that I face.

Benedikt: You know,

Myk: I've got a love, hate relationship with mixing

Benedikt: with mixing or with like producing in general, like audio production in general,

Myk: Yes. All of it in 

dealing with people.

Benedikt: yeah. I can see that. What was like remote mixing, everything you were thinking about. And so like eliminating the whole people in your house thing entirely

Myk: I've been considering that a bit more. Um, I do like doing remote drum tracking for other people and then 

just sending them the tracks to work with. But the few times that I have done some remote mixing for others, it was admittedly a bit more frustrating than dealing with people because you have zero control over the tracking process, and there's no way to make sure that you get good quality material. You do learn a lot in the process and you know, you, you do your best to, to come up with something that's usable, but there's always the caveat of you can't truly sign off on it because you didn't track it. And it's like, man, there's a lot of noise in those guitars and there's no way we can fix this post. Oh,

Benedikt: yeah. yeah, totally. Which is the exact reason why I started the self recording band and all this, all these things that I do here, because, uh, initially it was me. helping people and telling them the same things over and over and over again, like the, the people that I worked with as a mixing engineer. And then I, I just thought, well, I should just put all that information together for, for everybody and make it accessible and, and hopefully get some better tracks to mix as a result of that. And then it grew into its own thing, but the, the initial reason was exactly that I wanted to help people get better tracks into their computer, onto their hard drive so that the mix could be, could be better in the end. So, yeah, that's a, a true struggle. But I also do think that over the years, the, the general like, level is just, has just, um, just went up. I think the overall average quality is way better than it was like a couple of years ago. Um, more and more people can record themselves pretty well these days. And, um, so this is an interesting question by the way, in and of itself, and this is one from our audience. So I might just ask one of those questions that I got right now, uh, because I think it's, it's really interesting. Torson, he's, he's, uh, in, in one of my online courses and he's in our community, he's a super cool dude that I meet in our, on our coaching calls regularly. And he asks, he's also a Reaper user and he asks, do you think that overall there is better music out there nowadays because everybody gets like decent results? Or do you think it's there's way too much crap out there because everybody records themselves.

Myk: this is a very polarizing question. And I will try to keep my answer brief, but long at the same time. Now I wanna wanna preface this statement with the fact that I am old. Remember that with every answer I give, I am old So in some respects, I believe that the quality of music has, has gotten exponentially better, but on the downside of things, I think that because music is like music, production is so much more accessible by so many people that the talent pool is saturated for lack of a better word. And you have a lot of people putting out what I would say the same song over and over again. Now you have a general population that enjoys top 40 pop music. As long as you put out a 1, 5, 6, 4 chord progression, they think it's a great song. It can be 100% identical to the last song. And because you give it a new name, all of a sudden, Hey, did you hear this great new song to me being the old guy? I'm like, this is exactly the same as the last song that was in that same spot in the top 40. So, um, that didn't even really answer the question, but I'm hoping that you're seeing the mindset that I have here. I have a hard time with modern music because to me it all sounds the same. My wife is a good person to talk about in this, and she's not here right now. she loves pop music and, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with enjoying that. But the more that she's been around me, which we've been married for 25 years now, she's learned to appreciate music and to hear all the individual elements, instead of just accepting it for one contiguous piece, 

um, you know, it's like she could hear the 1 56, 4 chord progression and have no perception or concept of it because she may just be focusing on the lyrics, which is common with pop music. In a lot of cases, people just focus on the vocalist. Uh, whereas for me, uh, music, I guess if you were to think about it from the term, from the perspective of an orchestra, it's beautiful in and of itself as one piece, but you can also pick out the flutes. You can pick out the strings, you can pick out the Tempe and all these different little things to appreciate which in my opinion are sorely missing anymore.

It's, uh, it's kind of hard to quantify it, but it's just frustrating to me that it, that it seems that people who are insanely talented. Are glossed over that are making some, some great music, but you can have someone who has a certain look, can't write, can barely sing, but they have an engineer that makes them look and sound good.

Benedikt: yeah. that? 

Myk: all of a sudden they're at the top of the game with a mediocre song. So I didn't answer that question at all, but I would say a little bit of both music has gotten better, but it's gotten worse. It's 

gotten better in quality of production, but in my opinion, and I, I want to put that at the forefront, in my opinion, the quality of the writing has gone downhill significantly because it's way too easy for people to put things out there. So there's, there's more quantity over quality these days, I think

Benedikt: Yeah. There's tend to agree. I still think though, so I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a second here because I, I still think , I still think though that there's something to be said about being able to write something, even though it might be simple, or like not the best song, but it still resonates with like a lot of people apparently. And I think even though you and I might not understand it or might not think it's really good, but if a lot of people are listening to that and putting it on their playlist and enjoying that, then it's probably not that bad. You know what I mean? Like I'm not saying that every successful song is a good song, but I'm saying that there's something to it, apparently because otherwise so many people wouldn't like it, I think, and, and that's an art in and of itself. So I kind of admire the songwriters who are able to make these, these seemingly simple songs and, and, but make them so that so many people seem to enjoy them.

Myk: Well, I think that it's the familiarity perspective. Uh, if you take it from the, like, let's look at the average cover band versus a local band that plays original music, the cover band will get gigs that pay a ridiculous amount of money every weekend. Whereas the original band may be lucky to get a gig where they can recover their gas money. 

And at the end of the day, the people at these venues aren't really that interested in the music at all. But if you can have something familiar for them in the background, the familiarity wins every time.

Benedikt: Yeah. Yeah, you're totally right. You're totally right. That's definitely part of it. And, and, 

Myk: Well, and you even have to begin to think about it that way from a writing perspective, 

like if you want anything to get any kind of, uh, notoriety or airplay or what have you, you've got to find a way to write a hook and almost compromise what you want to do as a musician for the sake of other people liking it. And I realize I'm very opinionated on this topic. So 

please do not take any of this as gospel. It is strictly an opinion, and there is nothing wrong with liking whatever the heck music you like. I I'm just weird about it.

Benedikt: no, no, yeah, that's totally fine. And that's actually better than being like vanilla and like, you know, it's good. Good to have an opinion, you know?

Myk: well, I'm at an awkward point to where I would be totally content to sitting in this room and making mediocre music that I enjoy than writing a. 1 56, 4 chord progression with the same vocal melody that's heard on every single song, just for the sake of getting out there. I, I guess, uh, I'm somewhat a purist 

in that respect, but I also understand that my stance on modern music prevents me from being popular as a musician. And I'm okay with it.

Benedikt: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Of, of course. And was that maybe also part of why you as if I'm correct here, um, why you didn't choose to go full time with music, production and music in general? Because I believe you would be a good enough, of course. And you have been B you would have an audience, like you could pull it off, but then maybe you would be, at least in the beginning, maybe you would have to do a lot of things that you don't quite enjoy. So what's that part of the thought process that you you'd rather do less projects, but do the ones you really like, or is that not a thought at all? Like

Myk: I think that my real reason for not going further is, uh, if I'm completely honest is fear and self doubt.

Benedikt: Okay. The imposter syndrome basically, or,

Myk: Pretty much because like there's people that like the work that I do, but I second guess virtually every move that I make, this is the part that nobody sees. You know, you see the YouTube personality and think that I'm a certain way, but I cringe every time I get in front of a camera. And every time I sit down at the do, or if I sit down at my drums or pick up a guitar or base, or what have you, I'm constantly second guessing myself. And I'm at this awkward point in my life to where most of the things that I enjoy doing also caused me frustration because I'm a perfectionist

Benedikt: oh yeah.

Myk: So finding the delicate balance between constantly researching and learning new techniques and actually doing things, I feel like I spend so much time researching and not enough time doing. And that's really been an inhibiting factor in a lot of parts of my life.

Benedikt: Totally. 

Myk: So 

you didn't know you were gonna be my psychiatrist today.

Benedikt: I didn't know, too, but like I can, that's so relatable because yeah, I I've actually had this exact conversation with a coaching student of mine this morning, where we talked about like how we like to consume courses and read books and learn techniques and do the things. And sometimes the ratio between like learning, experimenting, researching, and actually implementing and doing can be off and we should all probably do more and consume less. And, uh, so that's totally, totally, yeah, totally relatable. 

Myk: And you learn so much more in just doing.

Benedikt: absolutely. Absolutely. And I, you know, a lot of us are that type of person. We, when we go, when you have to go 10 steps, we wanna know step nine before we even took step one, you know, we wanna know the whole thing and we wanna have it planned out and research and all of that instead of just taking the first step and then, you know, and that can, can keep some people from, from even getting started, which makes it even more fascinating to me that you took that leap and you started a YouTube channel and you've been consistent with it. And you get in front of

Myk: Oh, 

let me 

Benedikt: you and you hit publish, you know, because hitting publish is probably the hardest thing for many people, but you have been consistent and you've been doing it and this, and, and even if, even though you say you cringe, when you see your own videos or that you feel uncomfortable in front of the camera, you, you still did it and you're still doing it. So what made you take that leap and like jump into YouTube and, and overcoming that fear.

Myk: well, the, the start was plain and simple. COVID uh, I was working at home for about two years. The limited interaction with people. Wasn't that big of a deal for me because I'm somewhat a hermit. I don't know how people perceive me, but if they think that I'm outgoing or wild or whatever, based on how I am online, but for the most part, I I'm quiet. I don't talk a whole heck of a lot. I have to make myself do things like this, uh, to get outta that comfort zone and appear friendly. It's not that I don't like people. It's just that I like quiet. . Um,

Benedikt: Mm-hmm mm-hmm 

Myk: so. At the time I was wanting to learn more about video editing. And since we couldn't go anywhere and we're on lockdown and like, I've got to figure out something I can record in my house to edit. And I just got this idea, why don't I show something in Reaper? So my first video I think, was showing the, the navigator feature in Reaper. And I was really surprised that anybody watched it at all and I mean, it wasn't an overwhelming response, but 

it was more than one. And people seemed to like it and like the quote unquote teaching style. And I figured, well, let me try it again. And I just kind of kept going and I'm, I still feel like I'm refining it and figuring it out. I, I have no game plan. I don't have a list of topics. I had a short list for a while, but for the most part, the, the videos that I make are either spur of the moment. Why don't I just turn on the camera and live stream what I'm doing right this second, or I'm working on something. And I either discover something cool, or there's something that I'm doing that I've always done that I just think somebody else could probably benefit from this. So I'll just try to record it and figure out how to present it.

Benedikt: Wow. Yeah. yeah, I, 

Myk: A matter of fact, like it's Friday as of the recording of this, and I haven't recorded anything for this week, I had an idea. And when I went to try what I was going to do, it didn't work. Like I thought it was. So I'm back to the drawing board. Maybe one of your questions will spark a video idea for me.

Benedikt: okay. Okay. Yeah, maybe, hopefully. even, even more fascinating still, I, I think it's, it's always cool when people overcome their, their fear and just the, the thought of hitting stream, like streaming, what, what you just said, streaming what you're doing that. Right. The second, the thought of doing that scares the crap out of most people. So, and you still do it like, and even though you don't feel super comfortable about that, but, um, I think that's fascinating, 

Myk: the odd thing about streaming is I don't worry so much about streaming be. And I think it's because I'm used to playing live shows. Uh, I'm at this awkward point to where I don't really mind. If I make a mistake, I'm human. I'm gonna mess up. As long as my last move is greater than the mistake I made before, it, it kind of doesn't matter. So I'm totally fine with like F some friends and I are having a jam session. Let's just turn on the camera and see if anybody wants to watch. If I'm mixing something, turn on the camera, see if anybody wants to, wants to watch. Maybe they'll have some questions and I don't have to edit that stuff. So , it's just turn on the camera, make sure the levels are right and see if anybody wants to hang out. I think I I've, I've done it on holidays. Like I did it on Thanksgiving. I think I did one on Christmas. Just no announcement whatsoever. Just turn on the camera. And I find it amazing every time that people show up.

Benedikt: Yeah. And I think it's part, like everything you just described is probably the reason for why people like it. It's you being authentic. It's your, your personal teaching style. It's the fact that you are okay with messing up, that you are constantly learning. You're not one of those people who claim to know everything, which is very, very appealing to a lot of people. I think, uh, it just makes you human and relatable and, and also, the streaming thing, I think people have seen so many very perfect, super edited, like videos that it's kind of cool to see some. You know, some, some more of the real stuff sort of, or the unedited or behind the scenes or whatever you wanna call it 

Myk: And it's great to be able to engage with the, and to be able to engage with a live audience and answer a question right there on the spot is, uh, especially now when there's a lot of people, I mean, I'm, I don't know. It's, we're at a weird point with, with COVID to where we've almost forgotten that it exists, but something still happens to remind you of it. So some people are still sick, some people are lockdown and it's just gives a lot of people a way to engage despite being in less than ideal situations.

Benedikt: oh yeah. Abso absolutely. Totally. Right. Okay. So I wanna go back to one thing you said earlier, which was about the details and you, you had this, this orchestra orchestra analogy where you hear all the, the subtleties and the details and the music and all of that. Do you mean just the, the detailed, careful, carefully made arrangements? Or are you also talking about like imperfections in the music that you sat sort of missing these days? Because that's another topic it's not just the arrangements, but it's also, yeah. Yeah. The slight imperfections that, that make music interesting sometimes, but they can also, there's a fine, this what's missing, but it's a fine line because a lot of people also use it as an excuse for not playing tight enough. You know, there's this fine line. When is it like tight enough? And when is it like a cool imperfection that needs to stay in there? what, what's your opinion on all of that?

Myk: That's a weird topic because both have their place. 

Um, just, and depending on the genre, let's take death metal, for example. And even within that, that category, there's different styles of that. There's the extremely technical, new wave type of death metal, where everything is 100% grid aligned and there are no mistakes. I mean, you can, in, in most cases, the musicians can play that stuff. Maybe not as tightly as the recording, but they, they get it pretty close. And you go back to like the early to mid nineties style of death metal, even the early two thousands. And it was a lot slop, but at the same time, there was something about it that you just really enjoyed. Let let's take. Are you familiar with the chair?

Benedikt: Um,

Myk: Look them up.

Benedikt: no, actually 

not

Myk: right now, but, uh, 

uh, they had, their first album was called. Everything is alive. Everything is breathing, nothing is dead, nothing is bleeding. It's a long title. All the songs have really long titles, but what's fascinating about that. Album is every track was recorded in one take in real time. and it sounds sloppy. It sounds not perfectly polished. And it's one of my favorite albums of all time

Benedikt: yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm mm-hmm yep.

Myk: and uh, I feel like, uh, there's something that I tell the people that do choose to record with me is that when they leave, uh, I mean, and the people that do come to me, they come to me for what they would call my sound, which I don't necessarily believe exists. I mean, I guess I do have a bit of a sound, but I want them to leave with a product that sounds like them and has the band signature. And basically it sounds like them instead of sounding like the producer. 

Yes. I'd like for people to know I worked on that, but I also want it to sound like the band. And so often these days, I feel like music sounds more like the producer than it does the band. So we, we have music that is perfectly polished to the point. That's a lot of Pease, um, that is so polished to the point to where the soul of the musician is missing. And it's been, uh, edited out of the production, but on the flip side of that, because postproduction is so easily accessible, we have a new wave of musicians who don't master their instruments and they have this mentality of we'll fix it in post.

Uh, and it's for that reason, when people ask me, like, what do I charge for a song? I, I never give a flat rate and that that's mainly because if you're tracking, you have zero control over that musician's ability, and you don't know if you give them a flat rate, if they're gonna be there for four hours or 40 to get their part. Right.

Benedikt: yeah. I mean, you, you could that you, you could, if you like, listen to demos, do pre-pro with them or make them do pre-pro and you kind of are selective about the, I mean, I used to charge flat rates and it, it went well, but only because I took the time to, prepare them well, helped them prepare well. Or, and also because I, I rejected the projects where I was listening to demos and was like, you are not ready to record yet, you know? But I, I agree if you don't, if you can't do that and people just come in and you have no control over that, it's you can, that can go very, very wrong, like, yeah, totally,

Myk: I even would like to go and, uh, watch a band perform live either in their practice space or go to a few shows or something to get a better 

feel as to whether they're truly representing themselves to be what they really are. You know, cuz sometimes you'll get someone that, that talks a good game, but that you get 'em in the studio and they've never heard of a metronome,

Benedikt: Yeah. 

Myk: which is another interesting point thinking about older recordings. Like I love recordings from the, uh, thirties to fifties and even the sixties, just really old stuff to where they may be recording. Let's say to two or three microphones in a room and just have the, the performers arranged around those microphones and levels set to a way that. What they're recording is literally just the band playing back then. If you couldn't play your part or you couldn't sing, you didn't get recorded. But now as long as you look good, we'll fix it in post

Benedikt: Yeah, and I think, but still I think, good songs just sound better. And I still think even today with all the options that we have, it's still a good idea to be able to really be able to play your instruments and play your parts and to, to know how to, how to engineer, how to set up microphones correctly, how to do all of that, because then you can still do all the things in post, but it's gonna sound better and you're gonna have a better time doing it. And so I, I, I think even though you can fix a lot of things, it doesn't mean you should rely on that, but I also totally agree with what you said about the genre thing. There are some genres and, and in those genres are incredible players too. So it's not that all of them can't play, but there are some genres where the super tight, super polished extremely perfect thing is part of the aesthetic. So it's, it's not even a bad thing that it is like that it has to be like that almost like in some like metal chord, death chord, like the modern metal genres basically, that has to be super spot on. And then there are other genres where it's not like that. And then you have like, outliers, like, I don't know if you know, Kurt blue from the band converge, the producer. I don't know if you know him, like Kurt blue almost invented to me. He's like almost invented his own genre. He's one of those producers that you can definitely hear. Like, does the records sound like him? Not, not, not so much. I mean, they sound like the bands, but they also sound like him, but that's due to the fact that he managed to make incredibly punchy, aggressive, and, and modern sounding records that are still super raw and organic. And he does that in my opinion, better than, than anybody or than most people. So there is the occasional outlier who can do both, but for the most part, modern metal bands kind of have to sound pretty perfect in order for it to have the impact that it, the music needs, you know, but that's, that's only true for a couple of genres, um, in a lot of other genres it's, it would be a lot better to have some of the, uh, imperfections still in there. And 

Myk: Yeah. And it's strange. I think that that happy medium is what I strive to get. It's like, I, I don't want anybody to think that I'm totally against 

using vs STIs or editing because it's, it's a necessary evil these days. But I think that finding that happy medium of performing well and just kind of tightening it up a bit, and I use the word a bit, a lot in things that I teach, uh, and just trying to preserve the, the feeling of that band and not necessarily make them sound better, but just, well, I guess maybe you do make them sound better with a little bit of editing, but, 

you know, just like I said, just finding that happy medium of right. Using your modern conveniences and using the tools that are there, but not using them as a crutch, using them as, uh, something to enhance something that's already good.

Benedikt: Yes. 

Myk: Of course, a lot of that, that pressure 

Benedikt: Yeah, 

Myk: back on the performer. 

Benedikt: yeah, exactly. Like at the end of the day, the listener doesn't care whose fault it was or who did it, like either they liked the song or not. And, yeah. And, and so I think you gotta do what, whatever serves the song. And at the end of the day, it's also, uh, about being intentional. So editing doesn't have to be editing doesn't mean putting everything a hundred percent on the grid. Editing just means that every note is where it's supposed to be, whether that is perfect or not, but it's like where it's supposed to be. So that it feels right. That to me is editing. So it can be intentionally, intentionally making a snare slightly late, or it can mean making a drum feel slightly rushed or, you know, all these things, but it can also mean making it perfect. So you gotta be intentional and you gotta surf the song, I think. And the, one of the reasons why I'm asking these questions and I talk about this is that you have an editing course on promix academy. Um, a drama editing course, right? that's available 

through 

Myk: I just said

Benedikt: no, no, no. It's perfectly. It's perfectly. Um, yeah, it's perfect that you have that actually, because that just goes to show you like organic sounding music. You like imperfections, you like people playing actual instruments, but still you made a course about drum editing, which goes to show that editing ISN. Bad per se. It's just, it's meant to make songs better. Performance is better, but not necessarily a hundred percent. Perfect. So I think it's actually really cool that you have this opinion and still teach people how to edit drums. So that is, I think 

Myk: My take on the drum editing is, uh, well, when you think about the old recordings, in most cases, the band recorded live on the floor. They didn't do a whole heck of a lot of drum editing back in the old days, because even if the band had, let's take a song, for example, um, back in black from AC C, you can hear that song speeding up within the first few measures and it ebbs and flows a lot throughout the whole performance, but the kicker is the band stayed together. 

So even if the drummer sped up the rest of the band followed the drummer, and it wasn't that big of a deal. These days, people are recording one at a time. In most cases, in most cases like you'll have some scratch tracks, the drummer will, will come and record their part. And the drummer may be a little bit fast or a little bit slow in places, but the next person coming in to record their part, they don't have the luxury of being able to predict whether the drummer was gonna speed up or slow down. So for them to play in time to what the drummer put down, you kind of have to have it lined up to the grid. So 

in the course, I teach, uh, lining up the drums performance to the grid, but in a way to where it doesn't sound robotic. So you can still do that editing and preserve the human element. And the trick to that, in my opinion, is editing in larger groups instead of cutting every single note, in most cases, the drummers in time with him or herself, but they may get out of time with the metronome a little bit. So you cut out sections and move small sections to where that section is still in time with itself. But just shifted a little bit. Yeah.

Benedikt: Totally. And I I've seen that because I've, I've looked at the, yeah, the page they have on promix academy, where the outline of your course is, is on there basically. And there seems to be a module called fine tune, your performance, musical editing. And the description is pretty much what you just said. It's like, we wanna keep the performance from sounding robotic and losing its feel. And you said, because otherwise, why would we bother recording live drums at all. Right. So 

Myk: You can tell I'm very opinionated about this stuff too. I, I find it 

weird 

that 

drummers 

Benedikt: too. 

Myk: picked on Cause it's like if someone were to, to bring in a singer and say, we're gonna spend all this time recording you, but then we're gonna replace your voice with samples, which they kind of do with Melaine. But that's another topic for another day. 

Uh, I, I, guess it it's, it's weird. Like, uh, when people come to me, they never come to me because they're like, Hey Mike, we want this ultra polished modern metal production. I mean, that doesn't happen because they know that that's not what I'm into 

but if a drummer wants to sound like themselves playing on their drums, I'm the guy.

Benedikt: yeah. Totally. It's still, and I'm just gonna keep playing that role for now, but I still still . Uh, because I, I totally agree with every everything you said and like, uh, I, I like the, the organic raw stuff more than anything, but still, I don't think samples have to sound robotic either. Like they don't have to, they can't, there's a way to use samples and blend samples in a way that it doesn't sound robotic. Yeah, totally like, and I think that to me, I don't think it's really weird to replace or to rather enhance, drums with samples. I rarely replace, but I often enhance drums because I think like where's, where's the line, right? I, I use compressors and EQ and all these things to make it work. So if I can make it sound better and maybe even less processed by just picking good organic sounding samples, and then I have to do less processing that might sound more natural in the end than trying to make something work that was not recorded, ideally, maybe, or where the performance was lacking. So sometimes to me, the weird thing is that using samples can end up sounding more organic than trying to overly process something and trying to make it work when it just won't really. 

So this is a 

Myk: well, right. And. It's a bit of a double edged sword. And I, I don't want, uh, gosh, people that listen to this podcast are gonna come outta this thinking I'm a Jack wagon, 

Benedikt: no, no, it's still, they won't, they won't it's it's really great.

Myk: but, uh, the thing with samples is a lot of people think that I'm 100% against samples and that's not the case. Uh, the truth behind why I have the mindset I have about samples is this when I was first learning about sample replacement, it didn't make sense to me because the classes that I was taking at the time I was taking, uh, classes through a prominent online metal community who I won't name, because I don't wanna sound like I'm shaming them. And I have a hard time choosing my words sometimes, 

but I found it weird that sample replacement was the first thing people reached for when drums came into the equation, particularly, uh, in larger studios. And, and this may just be a lack of understanding on my part, but if I were working in a multimillion dollar studio with the best mics, the best engineers, and I'm bringing in the best performers to track, it would seem to me that I've already got the sound right there in the perfect room with the perfect equipment, with the perfect, uh, person playing the drums. Why are you reaching for a $200 box of samples when you have Matt Halper right there in the studio 

or a new SAS or something like that. And what I got to thinking was the only difference between them and me, so to speak is like the person who is selling these samples is just recording drums. Right? Why don't I just learn how to record drums.

Benedikt: Yeah.

Myk: So, so that, that 

started my years long passion, which is a forever work in progress of just figuring out how to mic live drums. And 

it, I think that it's kind of becoming a dying art. Now on the flip side of that, 

not everybody has a big enough space, uh, or the room treatment, which mine is a forever work in pro. I've got, you can't see 'em, but I've got a, a gush 15 panels over there. I haven't finished building yet to treat this ceiling. If you can hear the echo in the room that happened after I took out the carpet and put in hardware or hardwood flooring, like an idiot, and you know, so, so for somebody who doesn't have the room for a drum kit or doesn't play drums, but they can lay down a beat with keys so they can plot it out in the, in the piano role. And they can craft their music without having to have a real drummer. It it's amazing what you can do on a laptop. What that just made me think of something weird. A lot of people will call using samples, cheating, but if I point the gun back at myself, I don't have an orchestra. What if I wanted a violin? What am 

I gonna do? Am I gonna berate myself for using a sample of a violin or am I just 

gonna 

Benedikt: Right. Yeah. Which goes back to what you said in the beginning, like use whatever you have and you can make great art with just about anything if you use it creatively and, and, and, uh, and so that it serves the song gets the message across. So I, I totally agree with that too. and you know, it's, it's funny because I, I think that's one of those things too, as we, I said before, that people tend to, to like the, the raw more raw, like unedited videos, sometimes the same is true. Some, I think for. For audio, like for music production and especially drums, I feel like in the metal world, and I've been, I've been doing it full time for just about 10 years or so now. And I've when I was, when I started doing it full time. Any, everybody in the metal were heavy world, still wanted samples only basically. Or they, they even, they reached out telling me right away that they didn't care about the drum sound. They just wanted, wanted, wanted me to use samples. and they didn't put much care into recording. A lot of people did that, but I feel like now it seems like things have changed a bit. It seems like people are getting tired of that also a little bit. And especially of the machine gun sounding fake drum sounds. And I feel like people are hiring session musicians again, instead of programming drums, sometimes, and people are trying to buy sample libraries that sound more organic and less robotic and people are trying to learn if they have the room trying to learn how to record real drums. And a lot of the people that I work with now come to me saying that they want, if at all possible they wanna use their drums because they put a lot of care into it and they love how it sounds. And it kind of, it kind of switched a bit. It kind of, I don't know, as if people were, were getting tired of that from the past two decades of, of super polished metal or

Myk: well, I have to, I have to, ask you a question now. So 

the the people that are coming to you that are asking I, in most cases, is it the drummer that's asking for samples on the drums or is it somebody else in the band,

Benedikt: I usually talk to one person in the band, whoever the, the, the sort of quote unquote band leader is. and and I don't know what. 

Really? Yeah. So I, I'm not sure what they're talking about in like in the band before they communicate that to me. But, it seems like is the, yeah, oftentimes it's the opinion of the whole band and, and oftentimes it was it's it's like the drummer even says that he, he, or she would be more comfortable with just programming drums or using samples because they're not confident in their playing. That was the case more than it is now. and I still think none of that is, is wrong and I've had great results with just program drums and samples. I just found it interesting that it seems to have shifted again to, to more organic things and which wasn't the case for a long time. So

Myk: when you are doing programming of drums, do you typically at least maybe do a video of the drum or playing the part? Or do you guys just sit together and, and plot it out with not having heard much of anything? Or how does that work for you? 

Benedikt: there's typically two scenarios. So the one is that they program it themselves and they deliver a printed version and the mid, and then I might use their printed version if it's done well. And if not, I use it as a scratch track. And then I refine the mid and choose better samples and, you know, refine that. And the other scenario is that they record actual drums and then we either try to make it work or enhance it with samples, or if they, if they tell me right away that it's, it's only a sketch basically, and they want program drums. Then, um, Thomas, my, my assistant or partner engineer here at the studio, he's more than assistant at this point. He's just, he's engineers things with me and he's really, he's a drummer and he's really good at editing drums and also programming drums and playing drums, of course. And he will then use the scratch track and just program drums off of that basically program, better drums off of that. and depending on the budget, sometimes they, they even want someone to play the drums again. But like most of the time it's it's programming if they don't do it themselves, but it's, it's very rare. So in most cases these days, people send me their drums and want me to use them. it it's never that I, 

Myk: then . So in, in cases like that, where you end up programming the drums for a performer that said they weren't confident in their ability, do they then go and try to learn what you've programmed for performances or in these cases? Are they not necessarily bands that actually perform live anymore?

Benedikt: Yes, they are. Um, they, they perform live and they. I hope they they practice and get better after that. And oftentimes they aren't really that bad, but they don't feel like they're, they can play at the level that they wanna have on their, on

Myk: A lot of people get nerves once it's studio time, even though they're good,

Benedikt: Yeah. And also it depends on what they wanna, what they want the record to sound like when they compare, 

when, when their favorite records are clearly programmed or heavily sample replaced and they want that aesthetic and they just can't play consistently enough or hit the drums hard enough. And they want that supernatural larger than life sound. Then they're better off programming or using samples. If they like bands that actually sound organic in sound like real drums. Then I sometimes convince them of just trying to use their, their actual drums. It always depends. And sometimes they do shootouts. Sometimes they record it and they also program it and they just pick the one that sounds better or that they like better. So at different scenarios. but yeah, it's gotten more and more organic again, which is

Myk: weird about all this is I'm in the middle of a project recording my own kit as, uh, samples for an up and coming developer.

Benedikt: Yep. Yeah. Which is cool. I mean, okay, so that's interesting too. Now, when you create samples, do you try to make them as like detailed and like round Robin multilayer, all of that as possible? Or 

is 

it mainly one shots or.

Myk: This was my first time doing something like this. So I'm just following the instruction sheet they gave 

me. But for example, on my snare, uh, they wanted at least 12, uh, at least 12 hits per velocity and X amount of velocities per instrument. Um, so there, there will be plenty of, of round Robin. I added in some things that they didn't ask for. Cause I wanted to have some mistake notes in there, 

things that were not perfect, that will sound more human. Uh, some things where you accidentally click the sticks together or eat a little bit too much of the rim or not enough of the rim. So that you've got a pretty good percentage of it. I mean, it's gonna sound good, but there's gonna be some happy little accents in there to most definitely preserve the human element. We'll see if they like it or not, 

Benedikt: Looking forward to that. So I, I assume you can't talk about who it is

Myk: I cannot, but, uh, no, I 

don't think anybody would know him anyway. 

So it's, it's not a big 

pro 

it's not a big producer at all.

Benedikt: Okay. I'm curious to hear that though. That sounds, that sounds interesting. Anything out of the ordinary, anything slightly different and unique is great to me. So I'd much rather use something like that than one of the sample libraries that everybody uses. It's gotten to the point where I 

can immediately tell which

Myk: black 

number five from Steven slate drums.

Benedikt: yes, exactly. Kick 10 snare, 12 a was a thing for like 10 years or so. And then the last couple of years, and I'm not wanna, I think they make great samples, so I don't wanna talk shit about them, but like the get good drums libraries have been so heavily used. I can immediately tell if somebody uses the modern, massive kit and something like that, but like, you know, but it's not, it's not wrong. And if they like it, like there's no wrong. Right. And who am I to judge?

Myk: That's the thing is like, I constantly find myself biting my tongue by making the comments that I make. But it's, it's exactly what you said when you get to a point to where you can recognize the software that was used 

to me. That's a problem. Like, why not just sound like you? I think like when I, when I get down on myself about my guitar playing, because I've been playing since I was 13 and I still feel like I'm nowhere near the skill level, I should be. I have to remind myself that I wasn't put here to be the next Eddie van Halen, but I was just put here to be the first me. So that's all I can do is be me and 

Benedikt: yes, 

Myk: it.

Benedikt: yes. So I, I really wanna talk about REPA very soon, but I have one more thing to say here. No, no, you're totally. That's totally awesome. Uh, one more thing to say though, which is also interesting thought to me, uh, we both agree on the thing that we don't wanna recognize the software or the samples, but what about like recognizing a guitar that's being used? Because like where's the line, is that okay then? Because if I listen to a song and I can clearly tell that this is a fend tell or a Strat or some type of less Paul or whatever, like we can, we can tell that oftentimes, so that's not a bad thing. So why, why is it weird for us to be able to tell which drum was used toward a drum sample?

Myk: I think the thing for me is, and, and this will 

start an argument, but it's not the drummer you recorded. Plain and simple, 

uh, in a case of using an amp SIM, at least in that case, it's still 

the, the 

di recorded from that guitar, from that player. 

Whereas with sample replacement, assuming you're doing 100% sample replacement, it's no longer the artist that you recorded and it may or may not even be the hits that they did because they've been shifted 

in. I don't know. I, I guess it's just that purest mindset that I have that I, I can't come off of it. And I wonder if I would feel the same way if I were not a budding drummer, you know, cuz it, it seems like the people that embrace these things the most are never the person who's getting replaced.

Benedikt: Yeah, I've seen both. I've seen both, some people don't have a single problem with that. Like I'm the type of person I don't have. I, I tend to agree with everything you said, but I, on the other hand, I still don't have a problem with, if I'm not the, the one playing on the record. So for example, I'm in a, in a new band now and I joined the band where all the tracks for the first record were already done. And they said, and I play bass in that band. And a friend of mine started the band and he was like, I don't like, you can retract bass if you want, I have the eyes tracked and you can use them and mix the record, but you can also just play your parts yourself if you want to. And I'm like, I'm fine. Like, that sounds good. Let's just take the tracks you recorded. I don't mind not being on the record. I don't care. Really. I can't play it. I will play live and I don't care at all. but like you, I can totally understand if someone is like, I wanna be on that record actually playing. So I dunno to me, it's like, to me, the only thing that counts at the end of the day is that the record is as good as it can be and that it resonates with, with people or without ourselves more than anything, but also with people. And I don't necessarily mind or care about how exactly it's been made as long as at the end, it sounds like the band and it sounds like something we can, all we are all happy with and stoked about. Like, that's the only thing that really matters to me more so than how it's been, how it's been made,

Myk: And it's 

weird because it's like, I think with most productions, I mean, even the most perfect production you can can name. You can always find something wrong with it. And the fact remains that there is no such thing as a perfect production. You just have a deadline that you finally decide to stop working on it. 

I mean, there's stuff that I put out that like I would pass, appears for review and they would say, well, I feel like this frequency is a little bit overbearing. You might wanna adjust this. You might wanna adjust that. And I take everything that they, that they say to heart, but at the end of the day, if the band liked it, like I'm done,

Benedikt: yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I also have to add before people, uh, because now that, that sounded really weird when I explained that, but. When I'm saying, like, I don't mind not being on the record. It's also because probably because I still mixed it and I've spent a lot of time on the record and I'm still very much involved in it and in the sound of it. And so I feel like I'm part of it, despite not having played the base. If I wasn't the one mixing it, if I had done nothing on this record, that would feel pretty weird. But since I've contributed a lot, I don't really care about the base. Probably that's part of it. I don't know. Anyway, let's talk about Reaper

Myk: Do you know how often I say 

Benedikt: yeah. Yeah. I, I get, I can imagine, I can imagine I wanted to say it this time. Um, so first of all, I feel like Reaper is kind of the perfect choice for a lot of people. A because it's cheap B because it can do everything you can, like, you can imagine, like it's a very powerful dog and there's really nothing you can't do with it, basically, at least from what I've seen and from what I've tried. But the other thing is I've and that might just be because I come from different dos and, and they, they work differently and look differently. I find it to that the, the learning curve is kind of steep to me or it's like, it just looks different. The, the routing, the workflow is kind of

different. 

Myk: it's steep.

Benedikt: Yeah. So, so, so that's why I'm, I'm often thinking on the one hand, it's like the perfect. DIY sort of D and, and entry level do because of the low cost and all the power it has despite being affordable. But on the other hand, I think it's pretty hard to learn and pretty complicated, and it's not necessarily an intuitive routing and workflow if you're used to other dos or analog gear or, you

Myk: think that's the kicker is if you're used to other dolls. Um, I didn't mean to butt in, let me back off for a second and let you finish forming the question.

Benedikt: no, no for, for, uh, it's totally fine. So my question would just be, what's your opinion on that? Like when someone's starting out and they are not sure which do to choose, would you, would you recommend starting with Reaper and if so, what would you recommend doing to, to learn to learn it, um, quickly and, and like, is there yeah, that, that's the two part question, like, would you recommend it and what would you do? What would you do to learn it?

Myk: Well, I most definitely recommend it. And there's one thing that I, that I would like to say, I hear a lot of people say that Reaper is great for the price. And I would wanna counter that by just saying that Reaper is good. I mean, even if it 

costs $400 or $500 or $2, the amount of power that you get 

in it. 

Price aside is insane. Uh, I believe that Reaper's blessing is also its curse and that is its flexibility. Um, you made the point about it, not necessarily being easy to come to terms to as a starting duh. And in some respects, I can agree with that because the, the default settings are less than stellar. In my opinion, even just little things like how it saves your files by default Reaper will create a, a project folder and it will, will save all of your wave files and all of your project files, top level of that folder. And it, it looks like a kindergartner just threw up all over the floors, just files 

everywhere. So there are, um, John tidy with Reaper blog. He's got a fantastic series or not series, but a video about starting with Reaper that helps you to set up some San defaults. I've got a video on that same topic, myself, but just little things like setting up your folder structure to where every project has its own folder. And inside of that folders, a sub folder for the audio where that's all contained and inside of that folder is an automatic backups folder where it makes automatic timestamped backups every three minutes when you're not recording something. So if your computer crashes, you've never lost more than three minutes worth of work. And there's just so many things that you 

can set up that aren't set up and I'm like, why didn't they just do this right out of the box? 

Reaper to me is a lot like Linux. I love Linux, but if sometimes, if you just want to sit down and get on Facebook, you don't want to have to compile things and look at manuals. You just wanna 

sit down and look at what you wanted to look at and. In that respect Reaper can be difficult, but on the flip side of it, it's very rewarding. And in my opinion, it actually seems to suit a more logical workflow in, uh, in some respects, particularly if you're used to working with analog equipment. Uh, I think that a lot of people, these days have no experience with anything else. Uh, so they, They don't have the console mindset to compare it to now. I, I had said that I've not worked in analog year in studios, but I have most definitely worked with mixing consoles for live use. And Reaper seems to work in the same way of mixing console would. And to me, the one 

thing that, that confuses me now, I've never used pro tools. Um, 

I have dabbled in, uh, both Cubase. I think I spent a day and a half with studio one. And one thing that keeps me going back to Reaper is the concept of how a track is a track that may not make sense just saying that, but in pro tools and correct me. Do you, what do you use to use pro tools

Benedikt: um, I I've used it, but now for the past seven, eight years, I use Cubase exclusively.

Myk: And, and I'm not sure if Cubase follows this, this method either, but I think most dolls, they force you to choose whether a track is stereo or mono, or if it's gonna be a virtual instrument or, or 

whatever. Whereas with Reaper, you just make a track. And if I feed 

it stereo information, it's stereo. If I arm it to record from two sources, it's stereo. If I feed it a mono source, it's mono. If I put middy on it, it'll just interpret it. If I put stereo mono, middy and video on the same track, the playhead just interprets it as it falls over it. And it makes my life a whole lot simpler to not have to think about it. And if I want a track to be an a, I don't add an AOX track, I just add a track and then I feed other things into it. So it's, it's, uh, just the, the routing makes more 

sense to me, but it may just be, because this is what I spent my most time in. It, it seems that I see people fidling with weird routing in other dolls that just doesn't exist here, but 

Benedikt: Yeah. 

And it's yeah, no, I totally get that. And you're the first person to explain it to me like that. And now it makes total sense. To me was kind of the opposite. I, I have very much like a console mindset. I use a bunch of analog. You're still, I don't think it's necessary, but I, I, I do enjoy it. And, um, and I've mixed, on analog consoles before. And I think Cubase to me is the closest to an analog console workflow sort of. And to me, the concept of there being mono tracks and stereo tracks or returns and like accents and returns and whatever, you will find on a real console, that just makes sense to me. And the fact that a track is a track. Tends to con like to this, to up until now, until you've explained that now, um, this con used to confuse me because I was never sure if I was overlooking something, if I did it correctly, is this now really a stereotype? Is it mono? Is it a whatever? I just like when things are, have one function and are clearly defined and when one thing can do more things at the same time, it's kind of making me insecure. It's the

Myk: You just explained Reaper in one sentence right there, cuz there's a 

billion ways to do everything. And it's just a matter of which one do you like best? I think that is actually what 

makes it so challenging for a lot of people is, uh, I mean, if you go back to like say Lenox versus Mac, uh, comparison, you know, with, with an either an iPhone or any Mac products, you pretty much you use it the way that they tell you to this 

is the way, whereas with Linux, I mean, or with, with Reaper, it is infinite. Customizable to the point of, uh, of nausea , 

you know, Which 

again is its blessing and its curse. Because like, if there's something that doesn't exist or if there's something that I want to improve, let's say for example, with my drum editing, I've got a macro that I set up where I can click one button and it changes like five or six mouse modifiers to where instead of using a handful of clicks and, and things, when I wanna 

split a section of group's drums, I can just left click to the left of where I want to split. It'll add a split and a cross fade to the left of that mouse cursor across all the group drum tracks. And it also changes my mouse mofi to where, if I'm clicking on the bottom half of the media item, I can slip at it without having to hold a keyboard key, which sounds silly, but it's like I've combined six actions into one, one press. And as long as I've got that, that macro armed, it does what I want it to. And when I'm done, I click the reverse button to take everything back to their default. So it's kind of like scripting in some respects, but scripting, it can creating these types of tools in Reaper can be as simple as creating a, um, what do you call it? A custom shortcut that is a combination of multiple actions that already exist. So it really speeds up your workflow. But the trick is you have to kind of have an idea of what you want to achieve. Right.

Benedikt: Totally. And, and that's the one thing that keeps Reaper in the back of my, my mind. And I, I, I have it on my computer because of that. And I constantly keep thinking about whether or not I should maybe try it again one day, because I'm huge, like on I'm, I'm really huge on like systems and processes and, and speeding up the workflow because I wanna be focused on the creative stuff as much as possible. And, and I don't wanna think about the tedious stuff as much, and I want to just be able to move quickly and intuitively that's why I have a stream deck here. And I, I created a bunch of macros and, and a combination of, of things. And I I've sped up my Cuba's workflow as much as possible. Um, at least, I mean, there's always more possible, but I've sped it up a lot. And I've seen people do really crazy things in REPA that are still a lot of, a lot faster and more efficient than what I do in Cubase. So that's, what's intriguing to me. I just, I just have to get around the routing and the weird stuff that I'm not used to, but I've seen crazy things like mastering engineers. Um, my collegiate, he's an amazing mastering engineer that I work with on a couple of records and he uses Reaper and the way he's customized that and how fast he can do things like, you know, when, when even like the importing and sequencing of a record and stuff that takes the guy, like less than a minute, almost because it's like push off a button and everything's there and everything's like, it's insane. Um, So, yeah, that's, that's re that's something that's really cool. If you work on a lot of projects and you do a lot of things at once 

Myk: Oh, the sub-projects mastering workflow is insane. Like you can have a, a mastering project open and you can have all the individual tr uh, songs open in their own project in different tabs. And the mastering project be automatically updated based on things that you do in the song level. There's just so much weird stuff like that, that 

improves workflow. But going back to the first 

time user, uh, this day and age, you know, given some of our previous conversation, one thing that's a real turnoff for people that are coming that are considering Reaper is the fact that it doesn't include a whole bunch of virtual instruments. Uh, 

best. I recall it only includes one, which is a really bad synthesizer

Benedikt: yeah,

Myk: and of course my, my comp comeback to that is typically, but you only spent $60 assuming you even paid for it. You can just go and get the instruments you want versus paying several hundred dollars up front or a monthly fee for a bunch of vs St. That you don't even like anyway, so.

Benedikt: yeah, yeah. Totally, totally true. Yeah. That, that's true about the VSDs. On the other hand, I think that the, the audio plugins that come with reer are pretty decent and there are some tools in there that you don't find in the other dos. And I sometimes wish some of the reer plugins would be available on, on Mac because like, I wanna Mac and you can, I think you can get the reer plugins individually, but only 

Myk: Right. The, the standalone ones you are correct,

Benedikt: Yeah. So I wish some of the tools were a avail available, even just things like the, the famous, like the popular rear stream

Myk: right. To use between your doll and OBS that that's what I use for recording my, uh, my 

Benedikt: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so I think you don't get the VSD, but you get a lot of really cool plugins and utility tools and stuff like that with reer.

Myk: and, uh, with the, with the plugins that come with it, which they're, they're hundreds , 

um, they, they're not attractive you should know that going up front, uh, you know, going into it that the, the plugins are very utilitarian and appearance, but most of them, uh, sound fantastic and they do what the label says. 

It really, it, it can be a turnoff to some people who need a bit of a visual stimulus in order to, to create. And I, I get that, but it definitely forces you to use your ears to better understand your tools. The way that I've explained it to some is if you think about it from the perspective of an accountant, I've come across people who have the name accountant, but it turns out they just know how to use QuickBooks. They don't know how to do the math so 

reer teaches you to do the math. So regardless of which accounting program you you're using, uh, you'll have enough of the basic understanding of what these tools do to be fairly fluid in just about any do, as long as you can find where the things are. 

Benedikt: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's a great analogy. Totally. Right. 

Myk: it makes sense. 

Benedikt: but it it, makes sense. Yes. So what would you say. is that the custom, the, yeah, the customization part and the flexibility. Is that the, the best thing about Reaper or what do you personally like most about it? Are there some features you couldn't live without? Um, and, and what makes Reaper the go 

Myk: well, that, that track as a track is a really big 

deal to me because, um, it it's strange to me, like even in picking plugins to pick whether it's a stereo one or a mono one, uh, and on one hand, it makes sense. But on the other hand, I'm like, can you not just process the audio that this track is sending you

Benedikt: yeah, 

Myk: but I, I do like the customization. That is a, a big deal for me. And for whatever reason, it just, it just suits my workflow. 

Um, as opposed to me having to change my workflow, to match what the do dictates, um, what pretty much anything that I can can imagine I can set up Reaper to behave in that fashion. And that's what I like. I'm a tinkerer by trade and it just clicks with the way that my brain clicks.

Benedikt: yeah, you have an it background, right? You're an, I, I don't know 

Myk: I have 

imposter 

Benedikt: job is, but 

Myk: well.

Benedikt: okay. But, but you are like, what, what, what does the description read here? Like an

Myk: well, my, my current job I'm in, what am I? I'm an it manager for a multi-site medical clinic, but I spend the 

bulk of my day developing applications for the clinic, despite having no app development background.

Benedikt: I mean, you make records despite not having formal, like recording, uh, background. Like it's the same for me. I've never gone to recording school at school. And, uh, so I, and I still make records, so , it works. so, okay. Now do you have a few, maybe? I don't know. It it's, it might be too, uh, it might be hard to come up with something here on the fly, but maybe do you have a couple of tricks or things you do in reapers that are not well known or that not super popular or common or that you, that people are overlooking or like some, some special hacks or tricks that, that you wanna tell people about when they use Reaper?

Myk: uh, one thing that I would tell anybody, especially someone who is new to Reaper is 

right. Click everything. there, it, it can be difficult to find your way around Reaper because there's so many things that are buried in menus, but if you right click any particular item, you'll get, uh, context based menus that will bring up things that are specific to that item. That's a really good way to find out more functions that are available. Just for example, if you were to right click the record arm button, which why would you do that? There's different record modes. Like your default is 

just to record until you hit stop, but there's also record, uh, time selection. So if you've got a time selection, you can hit record from any point, and it's only gonna record once it crosses over that time selection, except that Reaper is a liar, it's actually recording the entire time. So once you hit stop, it only shows in that time selection, but you can trim it backwards if you wanted to pull in some, as you played into that section and it recorded afterwards. 

so, 

um, and gosh, let's see. So that, and just right. Clicking within anything. That's a great one. Also the 

actions list, 

uh, again, if you're having trouble finding anything, if you click on actions and bring up the actions list and just type in a word to filter it, you can find anything that Reaper can do based on whatever words you typed in. Like, if you wanted to find an action to. There's one that I use to automatically move my time selection to the right or to the left based on the current time selection. So if I've got four measures selected on the ruler, I can click a button to select the next four measures and zoom my screen in horizontally to those four measures. How do you find that if I go into the actions list and start typing, kind of what I'm looking to do, I can probably find an action to do it that may or may not be bound to a key press or may or may not have an easy to find menu option, but if I can find it in the actions list, I can bind a key press to it, or I can create a custom toolbar entry to where I can just click a button and trigger that action. Or I can glue a bunch of actions together to create a custom action. Then make a toolbar, uh, icon for that or key press for that. 

Benedikt: awesome. 

Myk: it's, complicated, but kind of easy . So,

Benedikt: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally get that. And, and how did you, discover these things? Did you read the manual? Did you experiment a lot? did you 

Myk: uh, that 

manual I'm still reading the manual. Uh, the manual is like 700 something pages, which is not that long because I'm also going through, uh, to get my certification for DaVinci resolve. And the manual for that is 4,500 pages. But I, I think that a lot of it, a lot of stuff I learned from John tidy from Reaper blog, just watching his videos and talking with him online and just in interacting with other people in the community, both on the Reaper forum. course that, that was long before I started my discord server, which is just over a year old. Now I'm learning a lot of stuff from people there, even though they're there for me, they don't know it, but I'm kind of leeching knowledge from them daily

Benedikt: that's insane. Mm-hmm totally same here. Same here. I learn from our community every single day and, uh, yeah. Cool. 

Myk: and just, there's so many resources online to, 

to learn from. So I'm constantly finding myself, looking at things on YouTube and those forums and learning from other people's questions, that things that I wouldn't have even thought to ask. Like that looks interesting. So I'll dig deeper and find something new just about every.

Benedikt: okay. Yeah. That's being, being a, a lifetime student is, is a great thing in general, I think. yeah, that's, that's very cool that you have that, that sort of mindset. And just out of curiosity, why are you trying to get the, the Doche resolve certification? Is that a necessity for some reason, or 

Myk: not at all. It it's. I think it's a personality, quirk. I, I just, I have to keep learning stuff. And I, I guess to me that just is a sense of accomplishment to get that 

certification. Uh, I wanna learn it inside and out. That's what I use for editing my videos. And I'm getting a lot more into video production of fun fact re does video editing too. 

uh, going back to, well, going back to John from Reaper blog, both, uh, John with Reaper blog and aria with IDD, QD sound, both being YouTube personalities. They use Reaper for their videos. Now it doesn't go as in depth as resolve, but they seem to be doing a great job with it. It just doesn't the workflow. Doesn't click with me for video. Um, particularly when doing like multicam edits

Benedikt: Crazy to think that it can do it on that level, because I mean, Cubase and even pro tools can do video editing in theory, like very basic version of that, but it's unusable, but you can cut and move things around, but that's it, you know, so it's crazy to think that a doll can do that too.

Myk: I kind of hope that, that Justin doesn't dig too far into video editing cuz you start to lose focus and you know, once you start to add too many functions to a product, uh, both of all the different functions start to suffer because you've just lost focus.

Benedikt: yes, totally. It almost inevitable. Yeah. Yeah, totally. All right. So I, I have a, a ton of more questions myself, but I wanna get into the questions that I got from our audience, because I promise to, to ask those, I, I know I've been going for a while, but if you don't mind, I would, I would love to ask these questions. Awesome. Perfect. This is gonna be a little longer than our usual episodes, but I I'm pretty sure people won't mind. before I go to the, to the technical or the, the music related questions, I have one question that's very important. This is sort of an ongoing thing in our 

Myk: gladly. Is it about 

Benedikt: And, sorry, 

Myk: is it about the beard?

Benedikt: no, it's not about the beard actually. Uh, so if you're watching this on YouTube, you can maybe see that I have like these fat fat stains here on, on my shirt and that's because I just ate pizza and I dropped a slice of pizza on my shirt before. and I'm, I'm telling you this because we have an ongoing thing in our community, and that is the, the, the question pizza or burgers. What's your answer to that?

Myk: Both. Uh, I mean, we have hamburger pizzas here.

Benedikt: What's a hamburger pizza.

Myk: so it is a pizza with pickles and ground beef and tomato and mustard and all the stuff that you would have on a cheeseburger and tastes like magic.

Benedikt: It does really.

Myk: yes.

Benedikt: Okay. That's the, that's the answer to end this discussion? Probably. Maybe I dunno. okay. So the answer is both. All right. All right. All well. Um, okay. 

Myk: Okay. Look, I'm gonna turn this back. What's your favorite cereal?

Benedikt: I

Myk: And if you say you don't like cereal, this interview stops now

Benedikt: sorry, but I I'm afraid that's the answer, to be honest like that. Do, do, do oats count a cereal? Like oatmeal? Is that cereal?

Myk: Ooh, oatmeal. Do you know what's great with oatmeal, 

Benedikt: No, 

I mean, I there's a lot of things great about oatmeal, but

Myk: coffee creamer. And instead of buying the flavored oatmeals, just use plain oatmeal in whatever flavored coffee creamer you want and put a couple of tablespoons of that in the oatmeal and just stir it in. And it's fantastic.

Benedikt: There we go. Like 

Myk: Drop 

in 

knowledge bombs left and right.

Benedikt: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Wow. Awesome. Like, uh, you big tooth cereals, 

Myk: very much. So I think I, um, despite my age, I'm still like six years old. so

Benedikt: yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Myk: I drive home from work for lunch to eat cereal.

Benedikt: really that that's very cool. Yeah. I don't, yeah. It's, it's kind of weird. I don't, I don't eat a ton of sweet things in general. I like, I like more of the I'm more the spicy sort of foods. I don't know. Even like in the morning I don't eat sweet things, so, but I, oatmeal is

Myk: Now we can get down with spicy too. I like spicy

Benedikt: Yeah, that's a whole other topic. I'm just growing, Carolina Reaper chilies on my, on my balcony, which is 

Myk: Reaper 

Benedikt: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I haven't thought about that. I do like Reaper. I've never tasted it because, and I'm afraid I'm gonna die if I do, but like I'm, I'm

Myk: small 

Benedikt: see. 

Myk: at first. Just 

Benedikt: Yes. Yes. totally. Totally. Okay. So to the, to the other questions now, Wayne Colson asks and you already know Wayne. I think he 

Myk: he bought the drum editing course actually met him 

online. Not too. I haven't met him in person, but we've talked online 

Benedikt: Yeah, yeah. And he, he sent my coaching program and he sent me a song to, to give feedback on where he, I think, used your drum, um, tracks and

Myk: Oh, the thing about the, uh, clown in the attic or something like that, I think it was called, he sent it to me and I can't remember what the name of it was, but I had done a. 

I did a one take play through of a song. So I was just goofing off on drums, listening to a, a backing track and put up the tracks for anybody to use. It was like 15 minutes of me sloppily drumming, and he made a pretty cool song with it.

Benedikt: Yeah. Wayne, Wayne's amazing. I love the song. I love the way he distorted the drums and 

made them go left to right. And all that. So, 

Myk: and I like the fact that he chopped it up and he didn't just use the straight 15 minutes, but he chopped up pieces and rearranged it, which I thought was great because most of the other ones that I've heard, people just tried to use it as is , that's

Benedikt: Awesome. Yeah, totally, totally. I, I enjoyed the song too, and I was pretty stoked to read your, your feedback that you gave him. So that was a cool moment for, for both of us. So, um, yeah, really cool. And he asked a couple of questions. So first question was, how exactly did your work with Warren he and pro mix academy come about? Um, and like, how did 

Myk: a fun story. Um, Adam Steele from hot pole studios. I had messaged him when I had the idea for the drum editing course, and I knew that he had a course out, uh, the ultimate was the ultimate Reaper guide and was just asking him for some advice as to how to go about distributing this once I got it done. And he just kind of, without missing a beat, said, it might be a good fit for promix academy. Let me message Warren. And he messaged Warren and copied me on an email to him just to make the introduction. And like a month goes by and I get nothing back and I'm just like, maybe Warren just didn't like it. So I messaged Adam just to follow up, to see if maybe he had heard anything. So he pinged Warren again and Warren messages me the next day, because it had gone to his spam folder and 

he just never saw it. So we talked over email and he, uh, talked about oneing to schedule a phone call. No I'm thinking schedule. So I gave him kind of my work schedule, my availability. Like, let's see if I can find something that works. And I gave him my phone number few days later, it was July 4th of last year. I at a friend's house around the pool and the phone rings and the caller ID says, Warren Heward. like, this has gotta be a joke. So I answered the phone and it's actually him. And so we, we ended up talking that first day for about two hours, which was wild. It was almost as if we knew each other, which was kind of cool. He was 

very down to earth, very easy to talk to. And he liked the idea for the course. And I told him like, I don't have anything tangible. It's just kind of a vague idea right now. But you know, I'd like to get it finished and send you some samples and see what you think. And then I got COVID

Benedikt: Oh, 

Myk: so I had planned, I'd take I'd scheduled myself a week off of work to produce that video. And I got sick the Saturday before my week off. 

And since then, like it took me a couple of weeks to get better, but then I couldn't stop coughing for like four months

Benedikt: Oh

Myk: so it, it made it really difficult for me to make even just my short videos on YouTube, because I would start coughing uncontrollably, but I definitely couldn't sit through those long sessions to do that video. I finally got that video finished this year. and it went 

out March 27th. I think you April, may. Yeah, it was a March wasn't may. I don't know it was a few months ago, but, and I have no clue how well it's doing, but I've had people that have messaged me about it. And yeah, I, I guess the short version is it all came about from a warm introduction from Adam, uh, Adam steel with hot pole studios.

Benedikt: Wow. Awesome. Really cool story. But you say the one video, it's not just one video, right? It's a full course,

Myk: Oh, it 

is. It's 

Benedikt: yeah, 

yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Okay.

Myk: but, and I've got it broken into chapters, but it was just, it was so hard for me to sit here, to finish a chapter, you know, cuz I, I, I edit my videos to, to an extent because I don't have a script, I just kind of babble and I may have to say the same thing six times to get it right, because I'll get words jumbled up in my head or I'll do something like this, you know,

Benedikt: yeah.

Myk: but to, to do that and have to edit out all the coughing, it was just maddening.

Benedikt: yeah. All right. Yeah, but that's such a cool story. And also it's a cool of war to just call you and then take the time to talk to you for two hours and like that's. Yeah. That's, that's really cool.

Myk: It's wild. It's really, it's opened up the door for, for more 

courses. I know that he, he did mention wanting to create a reer centric library because so many more people are coming to terms with Reaper, uh, both 

in the hobbyist, uh, side of things, as well as in the professional side of things. And, uh, you know, he, he's definitely interested in me making some more things, but I'm kind of a firm believer in taking other people with me. So there's, I got an army of Reaper educators with really good content that I hope to see them on there soon too. It it's, it blows me away every time that I look at promix academy and see little Mike Robinson right underneath Misha Monsour so so even though I'm just like some random brown guy in Tennessee, it's awesome to see my name in the same leagues with these legends. 

Benedikt: yeah. Must be a really cool feeling. I can, I can imagine. Yeah. Uh, and, and so you kinda already answered the, the second question he had, which was, do you have any more courses planned? So the answer is yes, apparently.

Myk: I wouldn't say planned, I'm still kind of 

kicking around some ideas. I 

I think the thing is I, I feel that I do well with short courses 

or just short YouTube videos. Uh, I have a hard time making things like long format because at, I don't know if it's a gift or, or what you wanna call it. I have a tendency to explain stuff really short so.

Benedikt: which is, which is great. Um,

Myk: I mean, my first few videos were like one and a half to three minutes, and it's a struggle for me to make a video longer than six minutes. So that's why I started adding in so much stupid stuff. Like the, the whole deal about I like coffee is which I do like coffee, but people think I'm a coffee feed. Like, I don't think I've had coffee for two or three days now, but, uh, when I started my YouTube channel, I'm like, I'm never going to get this channel to a point of being monetized. Maybe I can find a way for people to want to support me. So I looked into that, buy me a coffee thing, and it just became part of a segue to mention that, buy me a coffee link.

Benedikt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And I think that's such a good skill to have, to be able to explain something in a short amount of time. That's something I wish I had because I tend to be long winded and I tend to go into all of the details, which is also kind of cool, I guess, but, um, but I wish I, I was able to just break down a concept into a two minute thing and still get the point across. I tend to take too much time, so yeah. Um,

Myk: weird though. Cause like, even like my five minute videos may be whittled down from an hour's worth of footage because that many mistakes were made, trying to say something, 

Benedikt: mm-hmm 

Myk: So.

Benedikt: yeah. Okay. Yeah, but that, yeah, it's good. It's good. A good thing. A good skill to be, to have as a teacher. Awesome. Cool. So next question is also from Wayne. What monitors do you use in your studio? I he means speakers,

Myk: But we'll cover both. Uh, my video monitors are a couple of 27 inch 

bin Q 4k is that I'm still coming to terms with, I recently switched from 10 80 P to 4k just to get more real estate. And I quickly learned that a lot of applications don't play well with display scaling. So I am suffering with 4k at a hundred percent instead of being scaled to one 50 or 200%. And I wear bifocals . So as for my audio monitors, I've got, uh, Collie LP eights.

Benedikt: Mm-hmm 

Myk: And I mean, I guess they're okay. I don't have anything else to compare 'em to. And I'm kind of weird about monitors. I, I mean, I I've not ever experienced any like top end monitors, at least not to my understanding. Well, I probably did in some of the studios in Nashville and just wasn't aware of it, but I'm a firm believer that even crappy speakers will work fine. As long as you learn the speakers and, and learn your room. That's important. Uh, if I were to replace these monitors today with some of the high end a speakers, I think that all my mixes would be terrible because I haven't spent the time to learn those speakers in this room. And you, you really have to learn those, those nuances to be comfortable, that what you're hearing is accurate,

Benedikt: Absolutely agree. I'm on the same pair of speakers for 10 years now. And I'm to, I, I thought about switching a couple of times, but I'm totally scared of doing that for that exact reason. And, um, and, and that's the, one of the first things I do with, with my coaching students as well is I make them do a couple of tests, so I know what they are actually hearing. And then we try to optimize a few things of course, about their monitoring situation. But then I just, basically what we do is I try to make them learn the flaws of their room and their speakers, and just get used to that basically, because no room is really perfect. No monitor set is perfect. And you just exactly what you said, you just gotta get used to it.

Myk: Well, and it's weird because like, I there's so much science behind the placement of your speakers, as well as your listing position. Like where I sit now, my speakers are approximately 33 degrees. You know, it I'm an equilateral triangle between my monitors and myself. I've found that I was having a lot of trouble with low end in my mixes. And if I recall, I think I maybe was mixing way too much low end into things, 

or maybe the other way, I got a 50 50 shot at this. But as I was vacuuming in here one day and I was listening to silent planet or something, I noticed that as I got to a certain spot in my room, I just stopped cold. And I'm like, that's what it sounds like in the car.

Benedikt: Okay.

Myk: and it, and it was, uh, several feet back from my desk. And I noticed as I moved forward, what it sounded like versus when I moved back to that position and that, led me to, I, I, I'm terrible about like, I'll get an idea in my head and it's like an ice pick that just chips away at my head until I go and learn everything I can about something and started studying about speaker placement, which I still don't fully understand. But I started to understand that because my speakers were so close to my back wall. It was creating, um, I don't remember what the word was, maybe standing waves or something. I'm, I'm not that technical, but it was 

giving me a false impression of how much base was actually represented at my listening position and it was dead wrong. So now I have this really weird gap between my desk and the back wall. there's a lot of wasted space back there, but I can hear better

Benedikt: yeah, totally. Yeah, totally, totally. That that's huge. That's uh, the position in the room is actually huge. Yep. Totally right. Interesting to

Myk: and I could have overcome that except for one thing, you know, even without moving the fact that I don't spend a lot of time sitting in this room, just listening to music for enjoyment. I mean, matter of fact, if I'm honest, I hardly listen to music anymore. As I said before, I'm old. And when I'm in the car, I usually have local talk radio. I gotta start 

Benedikt: Me too. Me too podcast, audio books, talk radio. Yeah. That type of thing, but understandably. So if you spend a lot of time working on your own music, you gotta do something else afterwards. So, I mean, yeah. Okay, great. Thank you for the answer. Now, next question. Uh, he says you recently brought up, uh, brought up an issue with plugin Alliance and a delay that occurs when you're opening their plugins. Did they ever get back to you about this? I don't actually know what Wayne is referring to because I use a lot of the plugin Alliance tools. They are my favorite, um, plugin collection. So I use them all over the place, but I've never had any delay issues. I'm curious to hear

Myk: oh boy. Well, um, from what I can find, and I've, I've had plug-in Alliance plug-ins I don't have a subscription, so I've just bought the plug-ins 

that I use. Uh, and they've all worked fine until somewhere around the maybe around the third or fourth quarter of last year, I started noticing that some of my projects were very slow to load. 

Uh, I thought maybe there was something wrong with my computer. So I did the usual, um, system file check on running windows on that, which I usually do that every quarter anyway, because windows has the tendency to tear itself up over time, if you don't maintain it. So I went through the system file check and found no corruption checked my solid state drives to make sure they're not failing ran Ram checks to make sure that I didn't have a bad stick of Ram. Everything seemed fine. And I just chalked it up to having a crap ton of PA plugins on this project. fast forward to around February or March of this year. And I saw somebody posting the exact same experience on a forum, which got me to, to thinking. So I posted back in there and after talking with some people, I found that a lot of people were having the same problem and it wasn't isolated to Reaper. They had it in other dolls too. 

And I started noticing that even if I use those plugins and DaVinci resolve, because I can load VSTS there in the Fairlight module, they would have a bit of a delay in loading as well. Further research suggested that plugin Alliance introduced something that, uh, some programmers slash hackers that have reverse engineered. Some things are calling the PA layer that appears to be some type of copy protection. The thing that doesn't make sense to me is how it's affecting some people and not others, but when it happens, there's about a three to five second delay in loading per instance. So I put out a video 

about this and 

Benedikt: so so you mean when, when loading the project, you mean, sorry to, for, to interrupt you just to understand correctly when, when, when, when loading the project, not, not a delay on a certain track, but when you open up the project, it just takes long to open the project. 

Myk: Right. And now once the instance of the plugin is loaded, it performs flawlessly and doesn't take up a lot of resources, the plugin sound and work great. But if I've got 50 instances of random PA plugins across a project, that's 50 times, five seconds or so that I have to wait for that project to load. Whereas this time last year, the project would've opened in like maybe five to 10% of the time. And in the video that I made recently, what I, what I showed and what I found is that some other plugins, like the ones that are non plugin Alliance are BrainWorks branded like some of the SPL or Linde plugins that don't have that PA or BX moniker. They don't suffer from this problem. And if you check the change logs on these plugins, all of the ones that open instantly have not been updated in, uh, in probably the past year or two. But all of the plugin Alliance and brain works ones, they will pause without failed. Pretty much every time that I op I can open up a project now and put one instance of SSL, 4,000 G on it, it's gonna take five seconds to open. And this is on arising. Seven CPU, all solid state drives with 64 gigs Ram.

Benedikt: wow. That's interesting. I always thought that, like, it, it's a, it's a Cubase thing that it just, whatever the latest Cubase version just takes longer because I noticed my project's taking longer too when I open them, but I always, I didn't think about the PA plugins, but I have them all over the place and my template is full and my mixes are full with PA plugins. And I was kind of wondering why it took so long because I'm on an M one pro um, MacBook, which is insanely fast. And, and I was surprised by how long it took to open sessions, but I never thought about the PA plugins being the problem.

Myk: Well, and and when I posted that video and also on the, the forum response, I'd requested for people to try the test, doing it the same way that I did, and just doing a blank project. That way it's not associated with a bunch of stuff on other tracks or anything that you've got in it. Project, add a single track and load one instance of a plugin Alliance plugin on it. Uh, preferably something that's branded properly and time it 

then delete it and load another plugin. Uh, again, from plugin Alliance, that's not branded PA or 

BX, and most people experience the same thing. They said like 

the, the Lindel channel strip for example, would load in a second or less, but the, uh, BrainWorks channel strip plugins, whether that be the console in, or the 4,000 G or whatever, three to five seconds, 

which 

Benedikt: Insane. 

Okay. 

Myk: if you've 

got several of them,

Benedikt: Yeah,

Myk: so it got to the point where like, uh, well, the last response I got from them was in April, they did 

acknowledge that there was a problem, 

but they've not, uh, at least not in my direct ticket that I can't tell that they've done anything to correct it. And a problem that I'm having with the plug-in Alliance, uh, ticket system is you can't add any response. So if you 

if you log into their website and try to add a response to the ticket, you get an invalid token request after typing in all your gibberish. Now, if you respond to their email, it'll send it to 'em and it'll pin it to the ticket, but you can't do it directly on the website, 

Benedikt: Okay. Okay. Kind of, yeah, that's weird for sure. Okay. All right. Um, interesting again again,

Myk: I hope they fix it. Cuz I do like the plug-ins. I just don't like 

having 

to wait that long for a project that shouldn't take that long to open . 

Benedikt: yep. yep. Yep. That kind of destroys your advantage that you've created with editing, with creating all the shortcuts and scripts and stuff and in Reaper. So you got super fast, but now you have to wait four minutes to, for the session to open

Myk: well, and, and for a project that I had that I was trying to finish up, I just got to the point to where I would launch it and go like make myself a cup of coffee or get a snack or something. And by the time I came back, the project was open and it was, it was flawless after opening. But, uh, and I don't know how it works in Cuba, but like when you open a project that you've already saved in Reaper, it's got the splash screen for Reaper and it'll show what, what plugins are loading kind of in text at the bottom and you'll see them flying by, except it stops on each plugin Alliance plugin for so many seconds. And.

Benedikt: Never paid attention to which plugins there were, but yeah, it definitely does that, uh,

Myk: From what I understand a lot of soft tube plugins will do the same thing. So, but I don't, I don't have any since, since then, though, I know that, uh, IK multimedia had their group buy. So I like own pretty much every IK, multimedia plugin now, and most of them load near instantly. There's a few that are kind of resource intensive. It'll take a few seconds, but, uh, just, I like their plugins too. I miss some from plugin Alliance already, but I don't know. It's a few seconds. I don't have much longer left on this planet. So I need to keep these these seconds. I

Benedikt: Yeah, totally right. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Myk: mean, it seems like such a trivial thing and I, I would think nothing of it had it always been this way, but that whole thing of like, did this this program? No. What program, what does he call it? Did this project used to load this slow? I'm pretty sure it didn't 

and then finding out it's happening to other people. Like, at least I'm not crazy.

Benedikt: yeah. That's the thing. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. I will, I will pay attention to this now and do some experimenting. Cool. Thank you. So, final question from Wayne is, is your ultimate plan to topple Kenny joy from his 

Myk: so I don't think that that's possible. Kenny's good people. And I learn a lot from watching his videos too. so 

Benedikt: Awesome. Awesome,

Myk: there, there is, there is enough room for all of us. And even if I were to teach the same thing that he teaches, uh, what I'm finding is a lot of people just prefer different teaching methods. So, I mean, I could say the same thing that Kenny's already said, and 

my audience will resonate with it just because I said it in the way that I say things

Benedikt: Yeah. None of the, like none of the things I'm teaching, like I, I, I haven't, I haven't invented any of those things. Maybe I have a couple of techniques that are unique to me, but like, you know, but still, um, people find value and this is true for almost anything, you know? Um, I totally, I

Myk: yeah, there there's a, a scripture. I think it's somewhere in Ecclesiastes. I don't claim to be a biblical scholar, but it's something to the effect of how there's nothing new under the sun. And that, that is very much true. It's all rehash. Especially with pop music. There is nothing new. It's all 1, 5, 6, 4

Benedikt: yeah, exactly. All right. So, and then, uh, Torson has a couple, and then I promise we'll be, we'll be done. And just tell me if this has taken too long for you. right So, awesome. Cool, cool. So his question, the first two questions have already been answered about your journey and the full track thing, and how do you, um, happen to discover REPA and all of that? Um, but the next one is really interesting, and this is why is, and I'm not like I'm just reading his question. I'm not saying that I agree with this statement. Um, but he says, why is REPA still considered a semi-professional tool or a toy quote, unquote toy in the general perception against Cuba's large, a pro tools, et cetera. 

Myk: think a. 

Benedikt: necessarily think that's the case, but maybe you

Myk: In certain circles, it still is. And I think it's, uh, really just because of the perception based on price and not EV ever having used the software. Uh, if we, if we just simply take the name of the product pro tools, just the fact that it has pro in the title suggests professional. And now I don't know if you can agree with this sentiment, but literally every studio I've ever been in, literally where they're using pro tools. They're cursing it the entire time because something's crashing and breaking or not working. And in my mind, I'm like, why do you use this? If it's that frustrating for you? And it's because it's the industry standard now? Is it the industry standard because it's the best or is it the industry standard? Just because it got in the right place at the right time only, you can really answer that question. But I think that it's pretty much just a strictly a matter of perception because I mean, like you said, with Mike col collegian, or I don't know how to say his last name, uh, I would consider him a professional and he uses it and it's most definitely heavily in use. And, uh, for some reason, Reaper seems to be dominating the world in video game music.

Benedikt: And yeah. And, and you know what, I, I, I think part of it is also that people tend to defend things that they've invested a lot of money into. 

Myk: yeah, I think that 

was that confirmation bias. Is that the right

Benedikt: Yes. Exactly. So, and back in the day, like when pro tools came about in like in the nineties, when, when studios switched to pro tools, it was a significant investment to get a pro tools rig. You had to have the, have the interface, the IO, the, all this, like this was a five figure, sometimes six figure investment to get a full pro tools rig that would like have enough ins and outs for the console and all of those things. And those studios started to invest in the pro tools ecosystem and they just don't didn't wanna leave it, I guess, after doing that. And, and even to this day, I mean, it's more open now, but even like a couple years ago, you still had to have a certain interface. And like, now if you wanna use proles native, you still need to have certain things and it's quite expensive and you have to really subscription. And once you are in that ecosystem and you, you you've been using it for a while. I think it's hard to admit that it's maybe not, might not be the

Myk: right. It's like an it, the concept of vendor lock in, like you've put, invested so much into the system and it's frustrating you to know in, but it's like, well, I guess like with you, for example, if you were to switch to Reaper today, uh, Reaper may be the best doll on the planet, but you would ultimately end up losing time and money because of having to retrain yourself<laugh>. So you've got people that are, are locked into using pro tools. I, I think that what's happening is kinda like how people that had analog and tape studios back in the day probably got really ticked off at people who started doing music and computers at all. And then now the people who've been using pro tools since day one are in the same position as those old studio owners that being ticked off at other people, because they were able to get in and start doing the same thing for less money.

Benedikt: Yeah, AB absolutely. Absolutely. But I, I also still, I also really think that it's kind of changing already and a lot of the professionals, as you said, like Michael agent, but others too are using different dos. Cubase is pretty popular. Logic is popular for some things. Um, in the electronic world, Ableton is really dominating and, um, it's, I don't think that pro tools is as much of a standard as it was. And I St I think Reaper has its place. So yeah, it might still be that, that, that perception might still be a thing. But I, I don't think it's that much of a thing anymore. And I, I also think that musicians don't care as much anymore. There used to be a time where musicians going into the studio wanted to see certain gear or certain software. And if you didn't have pro tools, you 

weren't considered pro totally. It's a red flag. Honestly, whenever, whenever people request a quote and there, or they talk about a project with me and their first question is, what gear do you use for this and that? And what software do you use? That's actually a red flag. And that's like, I immediately question whether I wanna work with that person or not, because those are always the pain in the ask clients.

Myk: true. And I think that, that, that also comes from this being a social media age and they want to, I mean, I, I kind of get the idea of wanting to have the vibe and the aesthetic of a proper studio with all that geared. So you can take pictures of, for your socials and stuff. But on the flip side, it's like, do you not just care about the final product? That's like when I was talking earlier about trying to dictate to a carpenter, what tools he or she has to use if I hired you to build a house it's because I don't know how to do it. So why should I tell you what tools do you use and, and, you know, wanna micromanage all your steps? Um, I, I had another thought on the, the whole concept of being pro as well. One thing that, that some people are a little bit nervous about with Reaper is the fact that the, I mean, do you know much about the developers?

Benedikt: uh, no, I, I know a little bit about like, I've, I've obviously listened to podcasts and, and 

Myk: Well, the there's not, really. a company it's Justin Frankel and, and schwa. Who's a, a John Schwartz. Um, to my understanding, there is a contingency plan in case something bad for it to happen. And as far as support, you can email support, or you can get on the forums there. There's not like a phone number that you can call and that scares some people. Uh, but I would want to counter that with, have you ever called Microsoft

Benedikt: they've been they they they've they've called me or at least they're the fake Indian call center guys claiming to be my, for Microsoft I have never called them.

Myk: well, there's, there's lots of big companies that have a huge support team that offer terrible support. Um, I've never had to deal with avid support, so I don't know if they're good or bad, but just based on the cursing, like, I, I, I've learned all sorts of profanity being around studios, using pro tools. I'm gonna guess that support is not that good.

Benedikt: Yeah. Same with, with, uh, with Cubase, to be honest, I love Cubase and whenever I got a reply from them, they, it was helpful, but it can take them weeks or sometimes months to reply to any. So I don't even bother asking support, support, so

Myk: Well, what's weird about Reaper is, is the, um, the community is like a bunch of rabid Wolverines. Um and they they are quick to tell you, they I've said it before, but Reaper users are like vegans in that, you know, they're Reaper users. They they'll, they'll tell you. And, but they're also some of the most helpful people, uh, that I've come across. It's no, I won't don't get me wrong. You still have opportunity to be berated and be told to read the manual, but by and large, the community's very helpful. And I've been in situations where I had a client in studio and would come across something that needed to be done. Like I have never done this before, and I'm not sure. So I'll hop on a, on either my own discord server or just hop on the farm and post a question, make some coffee, give the client some coffee. Let's sit and talk for a minute. And five minutes later, there's my answer.

Benedikt: Yeah, 

Myk: to me is, is better than sitting in a calling queue. Now, sometimes it's great to have proper professional support, but I feel comfortable using the community for support with.

Benedikt: yeah, yeah. To, 

Myk: So, I mean, I guess I can understand from a, from a studio perspective, someone being nervous about not having true support, but again, when, I mean, how many times have you had a, uh, plugin not work because of an eye lock problem? And what kind of support did you get for that? How many times has pro tools crashed on you in the middle of a session with a high pro profile client and what kind of support did you get for that?

Benedikt: yes, 

Myk: so, 

Benedikt: A hundred 

percent. 

Myk: all things being equal, I'd rather pay 60 bucks for crappy support than a subscription . So

Benedikt: absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. Thank you. Um, next question. Are you all in the box or do you work with analog outboard?

Myk: I think it depends on how you, uh, how you view it. I would say I'm all in the box, but to my left, I do have a cheap tube preamp that I use for my overheads on my drums. Uh, I'm using it in a bit of an oddball way though. My audio interface is a rollin studio capture, which has got 16 inputs, but only 12 XLRs, uh, I'm using that cheap tube preamp to convert two XLRs over the quarter inch. So I can plug it into the studio capture. 

Benedikt: into the line put 

like, 

yeah. 

Myk: but I mean, I can't say I'm actually using it.

Benedikt: Yeah. It's totally fine. I mean, it's the, the studio capture has additional line inputs that you wanna use, so you need to more mic pre

Myk: right. I absolutely love that interface. The, the, the only negative I had to say about it is the only way to expand it is to buy another one. Like, I can't add anything to it with a, a, but I would gladly buy another one of these if I actually 

needed it. I want it I've got the money for it, but I can't justify it.

Benedikt: Okay. Okay. So it, it has the automatic gain thing, 

Myk: yes. When I go and right when I go to track my drums, it's usually just me. Um, have you seen either mine or anybody else's videos on the web interface for Reaper?

Benedikt: no, no, I

Myk: Uh, Reaper has a, has a, web, uh, web server built in and on my local network, I can get on my phone and go to rc.reaper.fm. It'll find my computer and I can choose either show the mixer or I can control it from my cell phone or I can create, uh, this is the cool part. I've got a headphone amp back there. That's routed from one of the outputs on my interface and I've, I can create a headphone mix and mix my own headphone mix from my cell phone, independent of the main mix while I'm sitting back there at the drums. But back there, I can click a button in my remote session to the computer and gain stage myself just by 

Benedikt: That's 

Myk: auto sense and playing for a few seconds 

Benedikt: that's that's totally awesome. Yeah, that's totally awesome. I love that feature. The new audience interfaces have that too, and I think it's brilliant.

Myk: What I'm curious about that, cuz I, I do part of me wants to buy one, even though I don't need, that's the bad part of gear acquisition syndrome. I don't really need anything, but I want stuff. I want to try the audience product. And I know that that can be expanded by ADAT, but I am 99% sure that if I expand it through ADAT, that that auto gain stage function is not going to work on downstream equipment. Unless audience comes up with their own, that somehow ties into it. If that's the case, um, of course you're still stuck in their ecosystem, so I'm better off just buying another rolling studio capture unless the audience has some kind of other magical feature that I can't live without.

Benedikt: Yeah, yeah. You're totally right. I haven't thought of that, but yeah, you're totally right. There's no way you could do that over ADAP you, that would only work for the audience, uh, inputs on the thing itself. Yeah. Yeah. But I, yeah, still great, great thing. And, uh, the rolling in looks great too. Yeah, totally. Me too. it's great. Yeah. Um, okay, so, and, uh, why, uh, do you, are you in the other than the preempts, but are you when you mix in the box because you just didn't, you can justify or didn't want analog equipment. Is it more convenient or do you actually believe that dos are just as good sounding or even better sounding

Myk: I can't really give an educated answer on that since I've not really worked with the analog equipment. I know that there's are those that would swear that it's, that it's better to use the analog gear. And in a lot of respects is thinking about it from a technical perspective. I can understand how, like, just the way that that saturation happens, because it's not gonna be the exact same thing. Every time you can get some interesting colors and, and flavors out of analog gear that you can't necessarily get in the box. but from a usability perspective, if let's say I had an 1176 in the rack right here, I, I don't know if those are stereo or mono, but I let's, let's assume it's it's okay. So I, okay. So I can run one thing through that, or I can buy this plugin that may not sound just like an 1176, but it does it good enough and I can run a hundred tracks through it.

Benedikt: Yeah. And the thing is no, 2 11 76 is sound the same. So it's just to me, the plugin is just another unit of 1176, because if I compare two real ones, they sound totally different 

Myk: right. So it's, uh, I'd like to, I do want to try some outboard gear just so I can, hear for myself, like I've been kicking around the idea of buying a few hardware compressors for a while, but it's another one of those things to where I can't really justify the cost. It's not like I'm running people in and outta the studio every day 

Benedikt: yeah, 

Myk: probably never pay for itself just to have 

Benedikt: yeah, 

Myk: experiment.

Benedikt: yeah, yeah. To be really honest. I, I have a lot of really high end, not, not a lot of anymore, but some really high end pieces of analog gear and I've done comparisons and I can't say that it's, it's definitely better. It's different sometimes. And I, I, I only have it because I enjoy it to be honest. I just, it's fun to me to use it and it inspires me, but I, it would be wrong to say that it's clearly better in an AB test. It's not, it's 

Myk: right. And I think from a client perspective, I mean, there are those who want to see that kind of stuff in, in the studio, but if you were to give them an AB comparison of, of something you've produced and you used a software variant versus hardware on, on one or the other, I mean, I doubt they're gonna be able to accurately predict which one was hardware. Now, granted they've got a 50 50 shot, so they've got a pretty good chance of picking the right one, but I guarantee you it's by accident

Benedikt: Definitely.

Myk: and I, I don't think that it's gonna introduce enough of a difference to where you can justify your cost or justify charging somebody more for that.

Benedikt: Yes. Yeah, totally. Which, yeah. Yeah. Which leads me to the next question, of course, in here, which is, um, do you think it's better to have all the options which we have in dos or is it better to limit yourself? Like what's better for the music? Is, is a doll with all the technical possibilities better for the music or is it better to have limitations because that leads to unique things like are the possibilities distracting from the song itself

Myk: a very good question. And one that doesn't have an exact answer. Um, I think that somewhere between those options is the truth. I like having a million options, but I like forcing myself to be limited because having unlimited options means that, well, let me, let me think about it like this. Um, I'm sure you're familiar with line six. I have a love, hate relationship. I hate line six uh, and I remember when I had, I remember when I had, uh, line six amps or pods or things like that. And now, I mean, I've dumbed down my guitar gear significantly. I've got one amp and it's a boss Katana, which is a glorified line six. It sounds good. but uh, I went to amps exclusively for a long time, and I think that with line six, you've got a billion options and you get to this weird point and I think the same is true of a Kemper or, um, ax effects, things like that. You can get some amazing sounds out of it, but the problem is in the back of your mind, you're always like I can do this better. So you find yourself, tweaking in not like, like drug user tweaking, but like tweaking knobs and stuff endlessly. And I got to a point to where I found that I was doing much more tweaking than I was actually playing guitar. So I, I think that you get that way with all the options in dolls and I'm at this point to where I have learned to love channel strips for the longest time, I didn't understand why people like them. And I found that having a limited set of options, I work faster and just make decisions and move on. Instead of, well, I could do this or I could do this and trying a billion different options. Yes. You may come up with some pretty cool stuff doing that, but at the end of the day, your plugins are mainly designed to fix problems. Uh, there's some that are designed to fix and address specific problems and others that are designed to introduce different colors or, or flavors or whatever you wanna call it, creative elements. And I've begun to approach my workflow with a limited scope and just use what's necessary to fix problems. And once I've got the things sounding good, then I can spend a little bit more time tweaking with endless options, but definitely not on the front end because well, I guess case in point, if you think about top down mixing, I've come to very much appreciate that idea because I can treat the drums as one instrument, or I can spend six hours working just on a snare and solo only to find out that it still sounds like crap in the mix. 

so, 

Benedikt: yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. Thank you for that answer. Great. Um, next thing, guitars or bass first, this question is like a, um, uh, an ongoing thing in our community too, and a thing between my co-host Malcolm and I, but he can't be here today, by the way, he's shooting some, I don't know exactly what he's doing. He's doing a lot of film, audio stuff, so he's probably on some Netflix show or whatever. Um, yeah, yeah. He's doing like location sound and he can, he always, he can't talk about the projects he's doing and I always get to, he always gets to talk about it after the fact. So I don't exactly know what he's doing right now, but he can't be here. But the thing is, he says he does the, I guess, more traditional thing of like when he does overdubs, he does bass like drums first, then bass, then guitars. I'm a big believer in doing not every time, but most of the time doing rhythm guitars first and then bass, because to me it's easier to spot tuning problems. And to me, most rock songs or most songs that I work on are written on the guitar. And it just often makes sense to get that down first and then record the bass. But I know most people do bass first. So anyway, what's

Myk: think I'm backwards on that. I actually like to record rhythm guitars first but not permanent. I just need to get the guitarist in to record scratch tracks. That helps me to lay out my project and label all the different sections. I've got a tool that I use in Reaper that, uh, a developer named, uh, XRA real named Raymond something or other, but that's the other thing with Reaper is there's lots of community built, uh, plugins or extensions, whatever you wanna call it. And this is one that he just calls region clock. What that does is since I've got these two monitors, I'll put region clock up on this other monitor, since my drums are in the same room, but way back on, on the opposite, opposite side. It gives a visual representation as to what section of the song you're in and which section is coming up. So if I can get the guitarist to come in first and help me to map out the project to where. kind of know how the song's gonna go and have all the meat regions mapped. Then the drummer can come in, have the scratch guitar as a point of reference, but also see on the screen, across from, in which part of the song they're on, then I can get the drums tightened up and then bring in either the bass player or the guitar. I usually like to do the bass player after the drummer so they can make sure that the bass and the kick are locked in. Um, but sometimes I'll bring the guitarist back in to go ahead and redo his scratch tracks and tighten those up. That I don't care how tight he gets it the first time, because it's literally just for reference because there's nothing worse than a drummer having nothing but a metronome to record to

Benedikt: Yes, Yes, 

Myk: there there's no good answer though, because it's like, everybody needs to hear something to keep their place. So as long as you pick something other than the drummer first, you're usually in pretty good shape.

Benedikt: Yeah. I agree. I agree. Awesome. Thank you. So now we get to the final batch of questions, which are all really quick ones. Not nothing too, too 

in depth here. 

Myk: I've been going kind of long on these, so

Benedikt: no, no, these are, I mean, who knows? So, um, how would a meeting with Kenny Jo, John tidy and you look like, and will the universe be the same after that collision of the giants?

Myk: wow. Um, I think that it would probably be about like this just, uh, a few guys just talking shop and trading stories. I mean, I talk with John pretty frequently. I've ne never spoken with, uh, with Kenny outside of just like private messages and stuff, 

but I mean, John, John and I are friends and John actually taught me how to edit drums. I just beat him to the punch and making the course. Um, I, I, think I, I talk about that in the drum editing course, but I first learned how to edit drums by hiring John, to edit some drums for me and film it. I wanted to learn how to do it. And I had recorded a drummer in the band that I was in at the time. It was my first time recording a band and just wanted to learn how to do it. Right. so 

I've taken 

Benedikt: Great, 

Myk: and modified him slightly and managed to sell it. So

Benedikt: awesome. Great, great. So the universe will likely be exactly the same

Myk: I think that that if we were to come together, it would be about like the Hadron Collider being fired. And it would probably create something catastrophic, but we wouldn't remember it. And it would be like the Mandela effect and the next day, nobody even has a clue who we are.

Benedikt: okay. Okay. Thank you. Perfect. Perfect answer. 

Um, 

Myk: pro tools.

Benedikt: this pro Yeah, .Yeah, yeah. Cool. Um, rolling stones or Beattles

Myk: rolling stones.

Benedikt: cool. Awesome.

Dave gro or okay, the next one is, is also interesting. I've never had thought about that pair, but like Dave gro or John Bonham.

Myk: Hmm. That's a tough call to make. Um, because the, they have similar styles actually. I mean, Dave, I 

think is probably a bit more energetic, but he definitely has a rawness to his, his playing that I really appreciate. And the same is true of John Bonham. So. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make up my own answer for this one and say their baby

Benedikt: Perfect answer. Perfect answer. Awesome. Simpsons are future Ramma

Myk: Ooh, dang. 

Benedikt: future. 

Ramma 

Myk: symptom, the symptoms

Benedikt: the, 

Myk: the, 

the, I can't even say that system of a down. 

Benedikt: is the symptoms.

Myk: I would have to say the Simpsons on that. I, I like both shows, but I find it interesting how the predictions that are made in the Simpsons are accurate.

Benedikt: Oh yeah. That's that's really, that's creepy sometimes actually, but like yeah,

Myk: I think that maybe Matt greening is a time traveler, or maybe he's responsible for the Hadron Collider.

Benedikt: Yeah, totally. It's it's insane. Sometimes even the, even the, the background and the scenes is like exactly what happens later in a photo or something it's crazy,

but like 

yeah, 

Myk: Damas

Benedikt: yeah, yeah. Yes. Yes, exactly. Awesome. Thank you. And final question. Um, what future improvements would you like to be implemented into Reaper what's already, what's still missing despite it having so many feature.

Myk: resurrected or something. Hmm. I think that I would like to see an easier method for routing. Uh, I mean, routing is pretty much easy. Like if I want to create a bus out of my drum tracks, I've got a, a hot key bound to where I just highlight all of my drum tracks and I press a key and it creates a folder track, which in Reaper is a bus. It routes all the audio through that folder track. But sometimes I want to create a bus. That's not a folder just so I can place all my buses in one place. I found that I can easily route all the tracks that I want to, to the desired track, but then it takes me an extra step to take them outta the master, 

instead of being able to do that all in one shot. So there, there's just a few things in routing that are not quite as intuitive or the, the way that it's displayed on screen makes it seem a little bit more complicated than it probably should be. 

I would definitely like to see some of the defaults changed with regards to the folder structure. Like we talked about before with the organization of projects that causes a lot of newcomers to lose data really fast, because everything like, if they happen to choose the desktop as their target space for recording, all of a sudden they've got a billion files, cluttering their desktop

Benedikt: yeah, Okay. Okay.

Myk: outside of that, I think about the only thing that I could think of right off the top of my head is I really wish that the graphics were SVG files instead of PNGs that way they are infinitely scalable, even at, uh, increment percentages. So like right now, Reaper is great at a hundred percent or one 50 or 200%. But if you like to use one 20 or 1 25 or 1 0 1, 

you just kind of had a look

Benedikt: Oh, okay. Okay, cool. I had no idea. Okay, cool. Thank you. I wanna say thank you to, to, um, to Torson and Wayne for all these amazing questions. Torson is in a band called LA 40 down from Germany. They are a punk band. They're super amazing. And Wayne is from the UK. He's a mixer. And, uh, I think his website is Wayne Colson, mixing.com. So you can look him up to if you're listening to this. Um, thank you for submitting all these questions and both are repro users, obviously. so, yeah. And thank you, Mike, for, for answering these questions, it's been way longer than I thought this would be 

Myk: apologies. 

Benedikt: no, no, no, 

no. 

Myk: it's weird. it's like, I don't like, talking, but at the same time, I'm long-winded

Benedikt: not because of you, but because it's yeah, we had so many things to talk about, which is amazing. And I'm, I'm very, uh, grateful that you took the time to actually do that. So where can people find you and where do you wanna, um, yeah, where should we send people? Because there will be show notes, um, for this episode and I'm gonna put all of your stuff in there, like the, the editing course, your website, if you have one, the YouTube channel, like where should we

Myk: I'm pretty easy to be found if you go to let's talk about reaper.com that will take you to the YouTube channel because I'm too lazy to build a website.

Benedikt: awesome. Okay. We'll do that. And then we'll put that in the show notes and your editing course can be found@promixacademy.com.

Myk: is correct. And if any, uh, now, as far as the discord server, if anybody would like to, to take part in that, on any of my videos over the past year, there'll be a link in the description to join us on disor. And if anyone wants to follow me personally, for whatever reason and see pictures of my dog and family, you can find me on Facebook under my actual name.

Benedikt: Perfect. Awesome. You do you have Instagram as well?

Myk: I have one, I don't use it very often. I gotta look it up real quick, cuz I, I don't remember what name I go by there. It's probably my own name. 

Benedikt: Uh 

Myk: always just gone by my name. 

What 

is how 

Benedikt: cool 

is 

Myk: how to work Instagram. Okay. It's Mike dot Robinson on

Benedikt: perfect. I'm gonna put all of these things in the show notes, and then you can go wherever you want. But I think the YouTube channel is the first thing people should check out because it's so insanely valuable, helpful spot on like, as you said, like short videos, but yeah. Information packed and, and also relaxed. I like the comp like, honestly, dude, like the, the thing you do so well that I found pretty fascinating when I was watching the videos was that you, the videos weren't long, there's anything, everything you need in a 10 minute video and it doesn't feel rushed and it's just relaxed and chilled, but still get all the information. is what I found fascinating 

and 

what I really liked about those videos.

Myk: Yeah. I hope to keep it that way cuz it's like, I, I love the short videos, but at the same time, I hope to get to a point to where I can eventually quit the day job and find a way to use the creative, to make at least the same amount that I'm making now. But short videos is not do well for monetized channels, but even when I try to make, make myself make a long video, I have a hard time stretching something past 10 minutes because it's like when I'm looking for something on YouTube, uh, in some respects, I like the long videos, but sometimes like, can you just get to the point? And if you start one more video, what is your boy? I will stop watching. Hey, thank you

Benedikt: yep, alright, thank you again for taking the time to do this, Mike and, 

Myk: for having me. You have managed to keep me out of the sun because I was supposed to cut grass today.

Benedikt: I,

Myk: and I didn't want to, 

Benedikt: that's a 

Myk: uh, it'll still be there tomorrow. Uh, this is edit this out if you need to, but I wish my 

Benedikt: I won't 

Myk: so it would cut itself.

Benedikt: that's a great way to end this episode.

Myk: I just got myself kicked off the internet.

Benedikt: No, no, that's perfectly fine. That's perfectly fine. All right. Thank you, man. Um, and I hope we'll yeah. Hope to talk to you soon. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna let you know how the, the community, uh, likes this episode. I think they will be they've stoked. It's one of the, the best ones so far.

Myk: Thank you. Oh. And if, uh, if you get really bored, uh, check out John Matthews on YouTube, he he's a German producer, but he go goes by the name two can studios, but his YouTube channel is John Matthews. I did a guest spot on his channel earlier this week, introducing a new plugin that he's created

Benedikt: Oh,

Myk: and let's let me see. There's there's a chat thing in here. Isn't there? Yeah. Let me send you a link real quick. I found it hilarious because, um, I got to say some things that I probably shouldn't on that video he had 

Benedikt: we're still on the episode, by the way. I, I just leave that in, right.

Myk: Oh, sure. If, if you want to, that that's fine. Uh, but he, he had messaged me because English is not his native language and he wanted to make sure he was explaining to me how in German, they use a term to explain this sound that he wants to remove as noses or nosy. And, and I explained that here nosy means something completely different. It's like, meaning like an adjective to explain somebody who always has their nose in somebody else's business, which of course led to, well, what do you call it? and that's when things got weird because here that sound, they would call honky, but also honky is derogatory So I did this video for him and there's a lot of geese in it and lots of, uh, goose sound effects and honks, but it made for a pretty interesting video

Benedikt: Very great. I've gotta check that out too. I'm gonna put it in the show notes. That's super awesome. Uh, but don't you, don't you call sounds like this also like nasal sounding or something.

Myk: well, my, my wife, the wordsmith, uh, said, why don't you just say nasal? And after that, I was like, yeah, you're probably right. But, but also nasally, you know, I would use that to describe the sound in, in terms of singing, 

but that same 

noise on 

guitars. People usually just call it a honking sound.

Benedikt: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. That's a, that's fascinating. You never thought about that, but yeah, you're right. yeah,

Myk: but did anybody that used to watch like seventies sitcoms in America? They probably got a kick of honky getting bleeped out every few seconds. so

Benedikt: awesome. Cool. All right. Uh, thanks again. And hopefully we'll, we'll talk again soon, someday and date.

Myk: thank you. Oh, wow. Do you see that moving in the background?

Benedikt: That's

the 

Myk: if I'm still, we gotta seatbelt before I go, come here, girl. Hey, 

bell. bell. Where'd you

Benedikt: Yeah. Show, show us the dog.

Myk: Bell dog. There 

she 

comes. Come me. Your girl.

Wait, where 

are you? 

Benedikt: beautiful.

Myk: Oh, there she is. Hey girl, bell dog. Give me five kid. I can't work this camera upside down. She's not cooperating, 

Benedikt: She's a, well, I I've seen her. She's she's be she's beautiful. Thank 

Myk: she is a large one.

Benedikt: Yeah, she is 

awesome. 

Myk: I guess I gotta take her out now. You ready to go outside girl? Yeah, right, Thank you. 

Benedikt: so bye Mike.

Myk: We'll see you next time.