ARTIST UPDATE

We recently sat down again with Page as he passed through Boston for the Together Music Festival. He gave us an inside look at how he mixed and mastered his hit "Fight For You" off of his newly released album Believe.

First of all, welcome back to Boston.

It's good to be back. It's been 7 years since I graduated from Emerson.

So, it's a big deal to be at the Together Music Festival, the first of its kind in Boston, where a lot of people worked very hard to put it together. Can you speak a bit about how your time in Boston affected your vision as a producer and DJ? How did that time in your life shape who you are now in LA doing the big-time.

The first club I played was Phoenix Landing, which I think is still doing their thing. It was a Wednesday night and I brought out an MPC2000 and this old EMU sampler. You know, 75 lbs worth of gear. There's nothing like that first time you play, when you hear that kick drum you've been tuning all day that's just super loud in the club. The place had great sound, and I think it still does. It [kick drum] sounded completely different from what I was used to at home. I had a studio in my dorm-room at Emerson. I was living in a triple for 2 years – so I had racks and racks of equipment right next to 3 beds, and I would always have to do everything on headphones, although I did have some decent Mackie monitors. That was a crazy process. I would work on mixes there and then bring them to the radio station, to WERS, and test it. That was the ultimate test: bringing them to the radio station and hearing what it sounds like crunched through these broadcast compressors. That was always a shock, thinking, ‘I didn't put that much reverb on there!' My time in Boston was really important and it was fun to be a part of the music scene here and I worked really hard. I did DJ a ton here, it was just sort of the beginnings of that and Emerson was a great outlet for that – it was really fun to do college radio. That really started things up, getting involved in college radio and managing the station.

Let's talk a little bit about your albums and remixes. I had a revelation when I was listening to Believe and I was about half-way through "The Longest Road". I remember thinking "Damnit, I think Morgan just made me listen to a country song." I was impressed with the fact that you're able to blend genres really well in your tracks. "The Longest Road" sounds like a blend of everything from rock, country, to pop influences.
So, how does that all come about – is it your taste in music or is it the vocalist you choose to work with?

I typically choose vocalists that I want to work with that don't sound like your typical pretty dance vocalist so the lyrical content is different, the timbre of the voice is different. I try to surround them with instruments that make sense. In "The Longest Road" I think there were slide guitars which gave it that feel of a country influence, but just because it has the guitar doesn't mean it's necessarily country – it could be the chord progression or the arpeggios. All of that can serve as clues to what the genre is.

I like to borrow a lot from different genres. I get tired of the same old sound. It's funny, you know, there's always the hot sound of the moment. I also try to be really inspired by music I don't like in addition to music that I do. It makes you really motivated to want to top that, like "I can do better than this."

What do you listen to when you're not putting together DJ sets and thinking about house music?

A lot of stuff. A lot of indie bands. Everything from your typical electronic stuff like Daft Punk to the indie band Florence the Machine. I really like the umbrella of electronica music from Royksopp all the way down to the purist underground things. But, that's the hardest question to answer, really, because every week it's something different. If you look at the playlist on my iPhone, it's just crazy – it's everything. I think as a producer you really have to listen to a wide variety of stuff.

Another thing that really strikes me about your music is that it's, for a lack of a better way to put it: not gimmicky. I think of some of the trends of house music over the past couple of years and you've got things like lots of distortion, rough edits, side chaining, and really crazy vocal chains.

All of that stuff has a sort of sizzle that I think is great for a while, but how many times do you want to hear that? I think a good way to judge how good a song or radio edit ism, is to ask yourself, "How many times do I want to hear this again?" One listen should not be enough to be completely satisfied – you should be just short of totally satisfied after a listen or, at best, addicted. The sizzle is great, but if you want to make records that last a long time, I think the song is the most important thing.

So, coming to the new album, your last album was sort of a collection of both remixes and original new music. Tell us a bit about how your aesthetic or direction has changed with this new album.

Believe is really about the artist album. 13 original songs, 2 of them are covers, one of a Rufus Wainwright track. I try not to do too many covers as I really like putting out original stuff. The point of this album is a really automatic, dark sound – very melancholy. It's not all about remixes and four-on-the-floor. It's kind of your album journey. You'll hear sonically that there is a common thread. It's a lot of analog keyboards mixed with acoustic instruments. A lot of heavily tuned vocals, a lot of layering – versus the other album "Elevate" which was all about remixes and a range of sounds, like down-tempo remixes to electro-house.

Now getting more into the nuts and bolts of production and how that process works for you, what is the key equipment in your studio setup? What are your go-to tools?

Stuff comes and goes, but the core of it is Pro Tools 8. I have an Avalon 727 channel strip that I use just as a pre amp and for a little compression. I have an M-Audio Sputnick mic that I use for everything now. I used a Studio Projects C-1 that was great. I like these cheap Chinese mics because they sound great and you're not spending $5,000-$6,000. I've compared them to expensive mics and there's really not that much of a difference. I think you do pay for quality when it comes to equipment, but it's shocking when you listen to them. I've had vocalists bring over $7,000 mics and there's really not that much of a difference. It's more about your processing and how you approach and shape those ideas and sounds on your computer.

Does it have a lot to do with your environment? What kind of environment are you recording vocals in?

It's just a bedroom studio without a vocal booth, so I have singers stand behind my shoulder. It's a carpeted bedroom and I have [sound treatment] hanging from the wall. It works perfectly – you just turn off the central air, shut the windows, and go at it.

I use a lot of Ozone. I've used it on every single remix and original. Alloy has been on every track on the new album I'm working on. There are certain go-to plug-ins that you get used to using, and it's more about the workflow and how it works for you. An interesting part of the process is seeing what gear works for you personally. I have a lot of analog keyboards like a Prophet 08, which is amazing. For me, it's nice to have that warmth and to not have to do a lot of processing. Analog keys just allow me to get the sounds I want without having to EQ or compress it that much. I'll just go in and side-chain it, and use some stock plug-ins for that. But, a big part of my process is using these dynamic plug-ins. The Glue is a really good one that just came out. It's like a $100 compressor that you can side-chain. I've been using that and Alloy as my real go-to tool.

Let's take looks at the Pro Tools session you brought today for "Fight For You". Let's talk about some of the tools in there that you would use on vocals.

"Fight For You" off of Page's new album Believe.

These days I'm putting a limiter on the main track. I'll use a brick-wall limiter just to make sure that nothing is peaking. Nothing drastic in terms of the threshold – it depends on the level of the track, but what I like about this plug-in is that you can kind of drive them hard and they don't honk, you don't have any big jumps. It just sounds natural. It sounds a little more analog than a lot of other plug-ins. I'll have a very subtle limiter on there, and a couple of compressors in-line. I use the limiter in Alloy which is killer. Just the limiter alone does so many amazing things. You could use just that creatively and do incredible things with it. If it's just vocals, I'll typically cut out things below around 80 hz. I used to be really into doing serious filtering, but there's something you lose when you leave that low-end in the vocal. But, there's also something about the presence that you need in those lower frequencies. I used to be a little more over-zealous about that. It's really important to cut out the low end in a lot of the vocals, and in the backgrounds to cut out a lot of the highs. In the digital world it's so easy to hear the highs that it's really important to roll them off around 8k on other voices and instruments so the lead vocals can really shine. Those things can make an enormous difference. The thing I like about this as opposed to other channel strips is that, in Pro Tools LE, for example, without TDM, latency is a big issue, especially when it comes to processing vocals. Auto Tune especially adds a ton of delay, so I have to nudge all of my other tracks over just a bit, which is really annoying.

Zero-latency in Alloy has been a big hit. A lot of Pro Tools users in the past would throw Ozone onto busses for similar effects and then realized that everything was being thrown out of sync.

One big thing I've been doing now to speed up the workflow (and there's never a formula to what I do), is to have markers for "verse," "chorus," "verse," "bridge," that you can see at the top in all my sessions. So, in my session template I'll put plug-ins like Alloy on there so that I don't have to keep dialing them up every time and change the whole structure of how it's going to be mixed. I know immediately that it's not going to clip because of the subtle limiter on there. That's on every track of every session now, and it just speeds things along. It used to take me 3 weeks to do a remix and now it takes about 3 days. That's also after having done 120 remixes – that helps too. I think that if you get a good work flow, you get your ideas down faster and you can be more creative through the limits of that structure and using templates.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the drums on this session?

These were processed with Ozone, and I used Stylus to create the drums. I had a live drummer come in, and while we didn't use the live drums on a lot of the record, they do add a nice little organic quality touch in the background. I'll start it with just getting a good kick. I'm layering drums less than I used to. I used to layer the kick drums, using 3 or 4, just carving them out. It's a crazy way to work and it's just a different sound. I like to use purer sounds now. So often I will just build the kick drum sound from scratch. I'll start with just a sine wave, add some white noise, really getting down to the harmonics of it.

Let's load up Alloy and look at the sound on the frequency graph. Were you thinking about the frequencies you wanted to hit with your kick drum and snare while recording the song?

I like to have the curve of the overall mix, and of the drums, to just be this nice transition, making sure that every frequency is covered. If there are problem frequencies, I'll just nudge those out and sometimes I'll add in frequencies to keep that whole range. A lot of times I'll start the kick drum focusing on the fundamental and I'll add a sine wave to add a little more impact, a little more "oomph" to it.

Do you usually start with a particular fundamental for your kick drum, or does that change depending on the key of the song?

It depends on the key. In the last few years, it's been all about using a signal generator to generate a bunch of different octaves off of that fundamental, using those to reinforce that sound, just as a sweetener.

So you're actually thinking about the key of the song when designing your kick sounds?

Absolutely. It's a whole way of thinking that you don't see with a lot of companies and a lot of plug-ins: thinking about things in musical terms. Sure thinking about things in frequencies, but essentially you're dealing with notes and the ranges of all of those notes and harmonics. That's something that's really nice about Alloy and Ozone; you can see what octaves and pitches you are dealing with.

Let's talk more big picture. Once you have all of the elements of your track, what are you thinking about as far as mixing? Do you mix as you go? Do you get to the end and pull all the faders down and then start bringing stuff up to get the right mix?

I have to do it as I go. I work on drafts, spending maybe a day and a half to get a draft sounding good. You don't want to get it too polished, though, when you have to come back later to finish the song and redo things. I see the value of leaving things as demos in demo-form and then really exhausting energy with your ears later on to make it sound better.

So do you turn a switch at some point and say, "Okay, now I'm in mixing mode"?

It's always piece-by-piece as I go. But, when I am at the end and have a deadline and think "this doesn't sound great," I have to go into problem solving mode. With Ozone I'll do sorts of "test masters." I like to have them loud and impressive for the labels, especially if it's a major label that just wants to hear crunch. Lately the way I've been working is starting with a limiter on the whole mix rather than bringing that in at the last minute. I think it's a lot harder to make those changes at the end. Before, I would just do the whole track and slap on Ozone at the end, but now its part of the whole processes starting a few hours into it, which has helped a lot with how the mixes have translated into the clubs and the radio.

It seems like limiting has almost become an instrument and if you turn it off it changes everything. What happens when you actually get to that final stage and you're ready to send things off for mastering? Do you leave any limiting on the full mix or do you let them take care of that?

I let them take care of it. I leave a compressor on now because I've seen mastering guys do amazing things with my mixes and I've seen them ruin mixes completely. It's very frustrating because you're paying them good money. Especially when you're doing remixes, you don't know where it's going to go to be mastered. I've done mixes for every one of these major labels and it's a different mastering guy every time because often the label doesn't have a choice if their top guy is busy. I used to leave too much flexibility in the mix, so now I compress it just a few dBs with no limiter and it's sounding good.

For a long time the #1 rule of making music was to never master your own stuff. But, there are a lot of people in your position who now say "Well, I know what I want my music to sound like and I've got a good listening environment. Why wouldn't I?"

As long as you have been doing it long enough and as long as your ears are attuned to hear any issues, go for it. It depends really on the destination too. I think if it's club stuff, it's a little easier to master on your own. It depends on if you're on the road enough to really road test it. But it's changed. The software has gotten so much better and speakers have gotten better too. Trust your instincts and make spectral comparisons to other artists' tracks. There's also a feature in Ozone to fit the EQ of another curve.

You're talking about the EQ curve matching. Did you use the spectrum snapshots on "Fight For You"?

I need to use them more. There's so much in Ozone that I've just scratched the surface.

Tell me a little about how you use Ozone and what you would typically do if you were getting something ready to send off a track to play at a club?

Now that I'm starting to mix with the limiter on, I'll use the loudness maximizer. I'll just have a little limiting going into it, making sure nothing's peaking, and I have a dither down in Ozone. I don't have Pro Tools doing the dithering. For mastering, I'll keep it at 24-bit, but for listening purposes like a low-res mp3, I'll bounce it down to 16-bit, convert it, and send it over to the label.

Do you leave a little bit of margin on your limiter?

Just 0.3 is what I always use.

So you leave just a little bit of headroom. Sometimes with mp3 encoding, when you listen to the .wav file it will sound great, but when you run it through an mp3 encoder you'll get little glitches or pops if you don't leave enough space.

The only time I've had that happen is if the buffer is not set right and it's a really intensive plug-in, you'll have some issues. But it's been great at 0.3. Maybe for a little bit of edge, I'll throw in some harmonic excitement. You can do some widening, widening the just the high frequencies, and mids. I keep it pretty basic – just a little top end. You can kind of set your range. Maybe I'll EQ out any problem frequencies, so if there's some low-end rumble overall I want to just shovel out I can do that. I don't use the compressor here very much. I like to sort of just keep it as is. I use the stereo imaging to widen it just a little bit. So, I'll widen the top, a little in the middle, and then bring in the bass so it's a little more centered. That can be a real problem with mixes, especially in club stuff if the bass is too wide. There's no real need for super-wide sounds. For reproducing the right sound consistently, I like to have a fairly centered bass sound, where both the kick and the bass line are interacting in that space.

Let's play the track so we can look at the phase meter to see what kind of stereo information there is. A lot of people don't realize this, as vinyl use is getting a lot more esoteric, but if you have a lot of stereo in the low frequencies, that can actually cause the record-cutter to skip. I think that's a trick that a lot of engineers use in electronic music.

For me, there's good low-end, and then there's the useless stuff that just makes it harder for the speaker to reproduce the sounds, and that's what you want to get away from. It all depends, though, as there are no hard and fast rules. I used to think that there were these absolute rules, like "never do this," or "never have this panned this way." It's up to you. Even the rule of clipping – 90% of the time you don't want to clip, but I'll clip this plug-in intentionally (on the input) because it drives it and can handle it. It likes it – it just responds well.

There's just so much. I've used Ozone for 4 years now and I'm still missing half of the features in Ozone. There's even more with Alloy and the built-in macro presets.

ORIGINAL INTERVIEW -

You've done about fifty remixes in the past year. So our first question is "do you sleep?"

Well every night I'm up brewing coffee at about midnight working until two or three each night. I do get some sleep but now it's a 24-7 venture.

You've been having a lot of success on the Billboard Charts, you've had three remixes hit number one now.

Yeah, three. I've been remixing a lot of these tracks and they've definitely been doing well on the Billboard club play charts.

A lot of remix artists sort of focus in on one genre or another, but you've been doing stuff for Stevie Nicks, Coldplay, Imogen Heap, so it's really all across the board.

Yeah, and a lot of this stuff started when I put out my bootleg album, Cease and Desist, and those remixes weren't even using the actual parts, those were just straight songs being sliced and diced and filtered. So that has led to a lot of the last 60 or 70 remixes that I've been doing that are legit.

Do most of your remixes start out as bootlegs (unauthorized remixes) that you then find a way to release or do you get approached to do things?

Usually I'm approached either from the artist's manager or I have a remix agent who sort of pitches the idea of the remixes. So either people come to you or someone else is putting it out there. I think initially everything started with doing it for fun and getting the mixes out there with the bootlegs. The idea with the bootleg album was to get it on peoples' iPods with artwork embedded in there—so just something fun for people to share that I could put on my site. It started out organically as a fun thing to send to friends, and then it progressed from there.

Is Cease and Desist still available?

Yes, the album is available at morgan-page.com.

It's interesting how that's come full circle, in a lot of cases people doing things like you're doing get more exposure for these artists.

It's led to a lot of work for remixing. Some of these artists I'd never hear from, and some of them ask me to do remixes now, like Tegan and Sara. It took a while for a lot of them to catch wind of the project, but then it came around and has led to a lot of work with major record labels.

It started with Danger Mouse. He first started out causing all of this commotion [with his unauthorized use of The Beatles and Jay-Z in The Gray Album -ed] and then he ended up doing the Gorillaz album and having EMI chasing after him. In the end it usually works out, as long as the mixes are done tastefully, as long as they're good.

You're definitely not just a remix artist, you have a lot of amazing original music too. You're finding an outlet for some of these original tracks on your new label, Nuance.

Nuance started this summer, it's something I've wanted to do for a while. It's an outlet for some of my more obscure tracks and just stuff that's close to my heart that hasn't found a home on a larger label. And this is just a way for me to get stuff out quicker and have a little more control over the process, because once you submit your music to a label, they have you exclusive for a certain amount of time, and it's their baby, they're calling the shots.

Nuance is a cool way to do it, and it's nice because it's direct with the store. I work with Beatport. You can go to directly to an artist landing page, www.beatport.com/morgan+page. They've been really good for getting really high quality music out there because they do .wav files, not just MP3s. Also, I'm putting stuff on iTunes.

Landline is the most recent release, which I've re-released with some new exclusive cuts. We've started with some back catalog material and are moving to new material in the next couple of releases.

A lot of the remix work you do is more commercially oriented and appeals to a certain audience, but your original stuff goes in a lot of different directions ... downtempo, and less dance floor oriented things for example.

That was one of the hardest things on the album I'm working on for Nettwerk, trying to boil it down to what kind of sound we're going for. It's going to be four originals, four remixes on Nettwerk, and four outside remixes. I've done a real variety. Some of the mid-tempo stuff like the Jenny Owen Youngs remix, to more full on electro-house for the clubs like the Delerium mix I worked on.

Your full length album on Nettwerk is due early next year, correct?

That will be coming out as a digital album, possibly a longer version digitally, and then physical release in spring 2008. And there will be a single called "The Longest Road" this fall that features a great up and coming singer, Lissie.

You're a DJ as well as producer. Are you playing out with digital files now?

I bring .wav files and sometimes hi-res MP3s.

What's your take on that as a producer? Do you like being able to deliver in digital formats rather than dealing with the compromises of pressing to vinyl?

I've always loved the sound of vinyl, but 320 MP3s and .wav files sound great. I do think you take a little bit of a hit on sound quality working with a laptop, but it's small and it's not enough that it really affects the performance with the crowd. For a while I played with vinyl, and then CDs, and moved into using Ableton Live. I never want to go back now, there's so much more control and you can do more with your DJing. Whether it's remixing on the fly, doing re-edits where you jump ahead 64 bars and you're already into the next verse. It's opened up a lot of channels and people like Sasha are using it very creatively, so I think that is the future.

MP3s make things a lot easier to distribute. I send out remix reels to people and it's a lot easier to send out hi-res MP3s than physical CDs or bulky .wav files.

I'm sure in general your music can reach more people faster than ever before.

Yeah, I'm in the process of sending out physical CDs to radio stations right now, and it is just so much more tedious to send out 200 promos to radio stations rather than sending out 200 links. I think now the emphasis is coming back to artwork and good mastering, so as long as it sounds good, looks good and makes a good package, it works well.

Speaking of radio you used be station manager for one of our favorite radio stations here in Boston, WERS! You're originally from New England, you came from Vermont and you're now based in LA. Was going out to LA a professional choice or a personal choice? Do you feel being out there affects your career at all?

That's a good question. You know, I moved out to LA wanting to get music in movies and film. I think my reasoning was Women, Weather and Work. That's what I told my parents and friends anyway. I wanted to come out and have a change of scenery. I had been in Boston for four years and I really got into the scene and really enjoyed going to Emerson College. But I wanted to see what this whole West Coast thing was about. And I'm still trying to pursue getting music in movies and TV but it's taken a different direction than I expected, I didn't know I would be doing more remix type work. When I was in Boston I was more into doing originals and DJing. But now it's back again to originals and full albums.

I think any location is going to change the sound of your work. I don't know if I'd be better off working in a remote location, I think these days you can work anywhere. But it's good to be in the creative hotbed of LA because there are so many vocalists.

Although I know one producer who goes through Myspace.com and looks at who has the top page views and plucks obscure vocalists. He does it by zip code. So that's one way of doing it! I try to work with referrals. With Nettwerk, with this album, they offered up a bunch of vocalists and I got to hand pick some really good up-and-comers.

When you record vocals do you work at home?

Right here. There's no vocal booth, I just turn off my monitors. I use a Pro Tools system with just a Digi 002. It's nice because they're not tucked away isolated in a booth, they're singing right behind me. It works really well like that. Sometimes I leave the mic on and leave the room, grab a snack or a cup of coffee and come back and they can feel a little less inhibited working solo in the room. But it's worked really well, there hasn't been any background noise or anything. I work in Silverlake which is a pretty chill area, really quiet, no ambulances screaming by. Which I remember from Boston was always a big thing. I'd be recording in Brookline and there was always the sound of something happening going towards the hospital!

You have been using Ozone as a final mix tool, but also in some cases on vocals and drums?

Things lose their life when you stretch them so much. Especially when you're working on something like a Stevie Nicks remix and the recordings are from 1981, there is a lot of bleed from other elements. You want to be able to isolate the good parts and give it a more polished sound. I think I've used Ozone on pretty much every mix that's come through. Some mixes I feel just need a little extra polish, others get a heavy dose of it.

It's also been really useful for mastering. On this last remix reel some of the remixes didn't get proper mastering. I went back and re-mastered them myself and ended up with a better product.

We've been hearing that from a lot of artists lately. With Ozone and the other technology available, people are sometimes able to get closer to what they want working from home.

I think it's always good to get another set of ears on it. But lately especially with running my own label, since so many of the manufacturing costs have been removed from the process, my biggest costs now are graphic design and mastering. So now I'm really taking a second look at mastering and saying, "do I really need to pay somebody I don't know 100 to 150 dollars a track to master my stuff?"

I'm still planning to have upcoming releases mastered with someone else, but I really want to do a comparison side by side to see how much better they are. That's my next experiment to take the newest material, send it out to a few mastering houses and compare it to what I can do with Ozone on my own.

One of the things that's most notable about your tracks is the way you work with drums. They have a lot of impact and separation. Any tips on mixing and working with drums?

A big thing I do is a lot of sidechaining. I've been getting more and more into it over the years now that it's so easy to apply a key insert. I use a lot of limiters.

Everything is kind of a compromise especially with bass. I try to take the really low stuff out of tracks that don't need it.

One of my favorite things with Ozone is the Multiband Dynamics. You can give a lot more beef to the track, a lot more punch, without having to boost the bass. I started with one of the initial presets and I've tweaked it over the years. I always do a little bit of Stereo Widening, a little bit of Multiband Dynamics, and it all sort of adds up piece by piece to a bigger sound.

To learn more about Morgan Page, visit www.morgan-page.com
or visit his Beatport store at www.beatport.com/morgan+page