Video Interview & Audience Q & A
Turn on the radio; you know, the one that's playing the hit songs of today. It won't be long before you hear something mixed by Manny Marroquin. With his touch gracing truckloads of top ten and number one songs, plus over 250 million albums sold worldwide, we've all heard his work. Artists like Bruno Mars, Whitney Houston, 2Pac, Fun., Pink, John Mayer, Shakira, Maroon 5, Rihanna, Ludacris, the Rolling Stones, Duffy, Mary Mary, Kanye West, Imagine Dragons, Lana Del Rey, Alicia Keys, and John Legend have all benefited from his skills.
I met up with Manny at Mix With The Masters, a weeklong seminar hosted by various recording luminaries in the French countryside of Provence. I was able to watch him lead the workshop for most of the day and picked up some cool techniques before our "live" interview. It was great to catch Manny in an "educational" mood, and the resulting chat was a blast.
Watch an uncut film version of the entire interview that Mix With The Masters was kind enough to capture, plus read additional Q & A from audience members below.
[audience question] Who are your favorite producers right now?
My favorite producers right now? There's Greg Kurstin. Greg did Sia, and he's done a tone of stuff. Great, great producer.
I should be taking notes for interviews.
He's definitely one of those guys. He's actually in a band called The Bird and the Bee, him and his wife [Inara George]. Great, great guy and a great band. Super talented. Alex da Kid, because he just pushes it to the limit. I love that. That's why we get along. When we get together, there are just no rules. I'm usually the conservative one. "No, that's too much!" There are so many cool producers right now that I get the privilege to work with. Honestly those two guys right now are amazing. Malay who did Frank Ocean — he's got such an amazing sound. Justin Meldal-Johnsen. There are so many good guys.
[audience question] You've obviously been really successful at getting the feel of a particular song. Do you feel like you've been more successful with that as your career has grown? If so, what's changed?
That's a great question. I think it's just being more mature; being wiser. Just understanding song structure. The innocence I had when I was younger I now kind of analyze to see what makes a song a song and what gets me excited about a song. I feel like it's just experience, the experience of knowing structure, knowing what a song needs, knowing what a song could have to have that emotional connection with more people than you can think of.
[audience question] Have you been aware of that growth in yourself?
Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. That's really cool to feel, because you really feel it.
[audience question] So you get pumped more often by your own mixes?
Exactly. I always say that. I just want to feel a big hug from the mix. Or sometimes I just want to be slapped.
You were mentioning earlier mastering being an extension of your mixing process too.
Nowadays it is.
Do you feel like that's because if you deliver something quiet, the artist and management and labels go, "What's wrong?"
Yeah, "Oh it sounds too dull." Absolutely. "It's not exciting enough."
Well then, what does the mastering person do?
Back in the day we didn't have those tools. I just played a song that I mixed almost 20 years ago. We discussed how we delivered it. I remember delivering it like 8 or 9 dB softer than how it came back.
On a DAT tape?
Pre-DAT days. The label goes, "Mastering saves records." They don't know the difference. It's just louder. We may not be mastering engineers, but we're always searching for what the end result is going to be. I feel like mastering today plays a completely different role than it did 10 or 20 years ago. Now what needed a little help on one of the mixes may not need as much help. We still need mastering, of course, because we still need a lot of the services that they do, for example, adding the CD IDs, doing the five different versions the label wants, the international version, the clean, the dirty, the Best Buy, the instrumental, and the Target special.
It's a lot of work!
We definitely don't want to do that type of work. I'm not knocking it. It's just not my thing.
[audience question] Do you ever think about your body of work, like Bob Clearmountain, you mentioned his name. People look back and say he kind of changed the way mixing is done. Do you ever want someone to look back at your body of work and say, "Hey, yeah, he's a badass!"
No. I don't even think like that. Shit man, I'm just doing what I love to do. If people want to think about... I have no control over that. Listen, it would be incredibly flattering to even be put up with a name like that, but I don't think like that. I just want to be able to be in the studio and work on stuff that I enjoy, having fun. Whether that creates an incredible discography that someday people will look back at and say, "Yeah, he's a badass..." that's icing on the cake. I just want my kids to be proud, you know? Like if my kid someday told their girlfriend, "Yeah, my dad was a badass," and I'm old and gray, that would probably be the biggest investment. Like, "Check this out, have you ever seen one of these?" "Ooh, is that a Grammy?" "My dad's a badass."
It would take someone years of study even to know all the things any one person worked on. I feel like when somebody says to me they like the record I do, it's like, "Which ones do they know?" Who's going to know every single thing you've ever mixed?
Right, exactly. I've been consistently doing it for a long time. For me, like interviews. I'm not out there to say, "Hey guys, look at me!" For me, it's just been a good ride. It's been like look, I'm here for the right reasons. I'm here to just keep working on stuff that I'm proud of (and some of it not as proud of). Hey, this is the ride. It's fucking incredible. It's wonderful. We get to do what we get to do.
What is Mix With The Masters?
Hervé Le Guil, and his wife, Isabelle, owned and ran Studio Gimmick, near Paris, from 1985 to 2000, recording many famous jazz and French chanson artists. In 2000 Hervé was chosen to manage the Armand Panigel classical music and film collection and La Fabrique, the 19th century mill that houses it, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. La Fabrique soon became host to its own studio in 2008, and for years has been host to many amazing sessions. Hervé and Isabelle's son, Maxime Le Guil, followed in his father's footsteps as an engineer and producer, working with Morrissey, Hans Zimmer, and Melody Gardot among others. In 2009 Maxime interned at Electric Lady Studios, sometimes with famed mix engineer Michael Brauer.
When Maxime returned to France, he hit upon the idea of hosting a weeklong workshop with Michael at La Fabrique to learn even more, and started working with Victor Lévy-Lasne to help run the program. In 2010 Mix With The Masters was born, and now with over 50 seminars under its belt, it looks to be here to stay. The roster of "masters" have included Steve Albini, Eddie Kramer, Jacquire King, Chris Lord-Alge, Andrew Scheps, Young Guru, Tchad Blake, Andy Wallace and Al Schmitt.
A bit more than $4,000 (USD) includes meals and accommodations — and remember, you're in Provence on a beautiful estate. After visiting for one day, watching Manny's interaction with the workshop, and having a delicious lunch outside, I can see how enjoyable, inspiring, and rejuvenating this week could be.
mixwiththemasters.com
www.studioslafabrique.com
We're not here if people don't write songs.
Right! Start writing some songs!
[audience question] Since the journeyman system of learning your way in the studio has kind of gone along with all the studios that have closed down, what do you feel most supported by, and what are you looking for when you're hiring an assistant or junior [engineer]?
First is personality and attitude. I want an extension of what I'm like. Definitely not someone that thinks he knows it all. Someone that you can just hang out with 14 hours a day and be cool. Obviously they've got to know how to be able to take Pro Tools on. Besides that, I think we can train anyone. It's just attitude. You've got to want to be there. Supply and demand nowadays is insane, the amount of requests we get. It's got to be someone who wants to be there and just goes the extra mile, has the right attitude, and is always looking forward, like, "Hey, we can do this better." I have an assistant, but I like when my guy takes the initiative to do something that helps the workflow. I'm like, "Wow, you actually thought about what can be." That's how I am, I'm always looking for ways to have a better workflow, a better system. My left brain is always engaged with how can we do this, how can we do that? How can we be better at this or more efficient on this? The great thing is that at Larrabee I get to hand pick them when they're runners. I literally get the best of the litter. That person I get along with. I can see this person be with an artist and not say something dumb. I get to know them before. Then they start to shadow, and I can see them in the room shadowing. Then they shadow my assistants, and my assistants will be like, "He's not going to gel well with you," or, "He is, he knows more than we thought." The main thing is you've got to have a good attitude. None of us want to hang out with assholes. That would be the number one.
[audience question] Today when you played your songs, it was Bruno Mars and Rihanna. Where the vocals sat in the mix was totally different. Bruno Mars sat deeper into the mix, and Rihanna was opened up and prominent. What makes you decide that? How are you thinking, and why do you say, "I'm going to put this singer up," or this singer in with the band?
It's a combination of things. It's not only my decision. My decision is how I treat it so that it feel more like what they want. For example, Bruno. He's in the band. I don't know if you've ever seen him live. He's a badass. He's like one of the best musicians and performers we have right now. Rihanna is not in the band. She's the female artist who's song "Bitch Better Have My Money" is about the delivery. We talked about the lyric. It's pretty strong, to the point, in your face. You can't have someone like that be in the background. The song dictates it. As a whole for Bruno, some of those Michael Jackson albums (he's a big Michael Jackson fan) vocals were kind of in the cut. They weren't up front. I think it's a combination of all those things. The other one is the fact that he's such a good singer. If you put him up front, then he'll outshine some of the musicality that he really wanted to feature. I think those would be some of the reasons why. But like I said before, it's not about a loud vocal. It's just what the song is about. We played "Moonshine", right? We said imagine "Moonshine" having the vocal 3 dB louder. Your body sort of changes. I think the emotion of that song is kind of laid back, where Rihanna is like, better have my money! Coming with a bat!
Every situation will be different.
Every song. There's no rules.
What about success?
There are so many times when you have a song that really connects with you, and obviously the team, and then nothing happens. The label thinks, "Oh, researching." They love the word "researching."
Researching? Like how people are responding?
How they're going to react to it. Exactly. But no one wants to talk about that. It's so interesting. It's researching what else is going to be a hit. I'm like, "Yeah, that could easily be a hit. It's a great song, great production, and it triggers an emotion." Then nothing happens, and they wonder why nothing happens. We talked about the level wars earlier, right? How loud it all is. It sounds great, but you don't want to listen to it again, because it's so exhausting. That's what we're trying to see, the psychology of what volume, what loudness does to you. You listen to something, and although it may sound great, you just don't want to listen to it again because you're so exhausted. There's no dynamic or ups and downs. There's no push-pull.
I think there's a balance between harshness and warmth, to find a place where things pop but also draw you back in.
Absolutely. Dynamics is something that we miss today because of that. Moments in the song that your body can actually relax as opposed to running a sprint. You're tired.
It just keeps hitting at you.
Exactly. People at labels wonder why it wasn't a hit, why it didn't connect. Well, it's a great song, but it's so powerful the things that we can do that you have to balance that. If you were to ask me what one of the biggest challenges as a mixer is today, that may be one of the biggest ones. "How do you get it loud without jeopardizing the integrity of that song?"
Right, getting it super present?
Present, yet musical, so that you want to keep listening to it. I think that's one of the biggest challenges today.
