MIKE PAYNE: Welcome to the Gearwire.Com Crosstalk podcast for Friday, December 15th, I'm your host Mike Payne and I'm joined by Drew Krag..., -- Hey, Drew. --

DREW KRAG: What's up?

MIKE PAYNE: ...Britton Wetherald...,

BRITTON WETHERALD: [IN A HIGH-PITCHED VOICE] Hi.

MIKE PAYNE: ...and Dan Agosto. How's everybody doing?

DAN AGOSTO: I'm doing good.

MIKE PAYNE: Good.

DREW KRAG: Awesome.

MIKE PAYNE: You might notice we have a new set. Dan and our very own Kyle Smith behind the camera -- Hi Kyle -- worked pretty hard on this, and we're happy with the way that it looks and hopefully you appreciate it just as much. Does anybody know what today is?

DREW KRAG: Uh, Friday?

MIKE PAYNE: No. Actually, today is the 25th episode of Gearwire Crosstalk, the big two-five. That means Crosstalk Podcast is now able to legally rent cars without paying extra fees, so --

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's older than me.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. So, grab a seat and bring your own beer because Crosstalk is going on a road trip through audio.

DAN AGOSTO: Uh.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That was the worst joke I've heard all -- In all 25 episodes, you just topped your whole all-time bad joke list.

DAN AGOSTO: [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: Yes.

DREW KRAG: That was very bad.

MIKE PAYNE: All right, so the first stop on our road trip through audio is Windows Vista. Vista is on it's way to a PC near you on January 30th of 2007. We're going to take a look at how this will affect PC-based computer recordists and share some of our own heated opinions. Next, we'll be reviewing some cool plugins by Ugo Audio, which is a boutique VST plug developer. We'll check out Iron Head, which is a wild, morphing drum synth, and Tunguska, a morphing multi-effect plugin. And last, if you caught Crosstalk episode 24, you got one heck of a scorcher. Live on the air, the Crosstalk crew produced a new bumper outro for the Gearwire videos. We started with nothing and picked a genre out of a hat. What did we pick? Hair metal. Yes.

DAN AGOSTO: Ooh!

MIKE PAYNE: Hair metal. I don't know if I've laughed that much during a Crosstalk show but I surely never had that much fun. This week, we'll be mixing the hair metal bumper we recorded in episode 24, live on the air, with the help of Blue Cat plugins.

Before we get started, we got to represent Gearwire. Get involved. Shoot us an email at crosstalk@gearwire.com. We've hired a cute, blonde secretary to answer your emails, and if you want to perv it up, just send an email our way. [INDISCERNIBLE] [LAUGHING]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: You are topping the list more and more!

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Each and every time like it just gets worse and worse. I'm like man, you can't dig any deeper.

MIKE PAYNE: A scorcher?

DAN AGOSTO: We're going to get some --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yes!

DAN AGOSTO: Yes. We're going to get some spam.

MIKE PAYNE: You know what? When I said "Scorcher", I was originally going to talk about --

BRITTON WETHERALD: How bad I -- How I said it like Rick James in heels?

MIKE PAYNE: Well, I was going to tie it to like VD Scorcher, you know.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: Ooh.

MIKE PAYNE: But I didn't. I didn't. See, I could not get any worse than I did.

DAN AGOSTO: I think you just did.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. I did [LAUGHING]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DREW KRAG: Yeah. You just did.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You just dug yourself the grave.

MIKE PAYNE: Oh well.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You should be to China already.

MIKE PAYNE: Oh. Should I make this my last episode? Should I just leave and get it on?

DAN AGOSTO: [INDISCERNIBLE]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Want to perv it off --

MIKE PAYNE: I mean anybody can read off the screen, you know, but anyway, all right. So, if you want to send an email our way, hat's the moral of that story. Additionally, check out the Gearwire forums. Join the conversation and share the buzz at forums@gearwire.com. And last, if you haven't already, sign up for the Gearwire newsletter. You can find the link at the top right of any page on Gearwire.Com.

So starting off, Windows Vista is on it's way. MOTU is ready fro the release, having already made Vista available -- Vista drivers available for their full line of audio gear.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Wow for discussion.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: So yeah.

DREW KRAG: Well done. Vista, huh?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, we've had some stories up on Gearwire.Com. I feel a lot of negativity towards Vista.

DREW KRAG: I'm -- Well, I'll say something. I'm a Mac guy myself but I use Windows primarily because I'm somewhat poor and it's a lot cheaper and I don't really like it. I've always -- I've been using Windows since I was a child and it just seems like the functionality has gone down in my opinion, but as far as Vista goes, there's -- My stance on it is you kind of have to wait for it to be out before we can judge whether or not it's going to work or not. I mean that's kind of how software or OS systems go and software goes. You kind of have to wait until it's out.

DAN AGOSTO: I think one of the big things is that they're pushing Vista so hard, and one of the things Windows has traditionally had over Macintosh is that it's a more affordable operating system where it allows you to get more affordable hardware. And, now we're hearing in Vista, you know, you need like a dual core Pentium to do music.

BRITTON WETHERALD: At least 2 GB of RAM.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, 2 GB of RAM, and, you know, I personally, yeah I have a -- Actually, I don't have a dual core Pentium in my home studio. I still have a single core I will be updating at some point and I only have like 1.5 GB of RAM, so I probably would not be, you know, up to spec with that.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I mean like honestly, it's like a few years ago when they released OS X for Mac, it was like oh my gosh, you need to do this and this. It was a huge headache because nobody released drivers for it and it was just a headache for every guy who did recording. I mean like I am still actually recording on OS 9 when I'm using Mac for my Pro Tools rig because I just did not want to like convert everything over to OS X, and it's just because it's a huge pain in the butt, but you know everybody now who has OS X, I'm sure if you're using like Pro Tools or Logic or what not, you're already in OS X, it's not something that you think about now. Technology has caught up with new purchasers. For all the older cats, updating is going to be the huge problem. But, you know, as far as like it was bound to happen first off. Vista at least is releasing its drivers to everybody and enough time to give audio developers to, you know.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It seems like Windows is doing a pretty good job of getting the source out to developers so that they can do this and it seems lie the developers in turn are responding by creating these drivers. At least MOTU and -- There's been a lot more and there's a lot of reports on these things but yeah. I remember the switch-over to OS X. I was at university at that time, and we had to do these media projects. Pro Tools would only run in OS X, the version we had, but then we also had to, you know, do video stuff, and when we wanted to put the sound to a video, you know, we had to boot up in OS 9 like classic or whatever and just almost every time you start exporting, you'd hear the crash, and I'm just like hoping to God we don't have to go into any sort of, you know, old version of Windows to run software.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, what's beautiful about Vista actually is that Windows has always done one good thing, and it's always been completely backward compatible, all right lie Vista's operating system -- I mean like Windows --

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, this is coming from a guy -- You've used Mac mostly though.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I've used Mac and a lot of Windows stuff.

DAN AGOSTO: I mean I remember back when I would play computer video games when I was in grade school like we would update. When we updated from like a 486SX to a 486DX, you know, some of my video games wouldn't work and I was crushed.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, I mean like as far as audio programs are concerned like I can run Impulse like old Impulse tracker software programs that were written for 98 in XP with no problem, and the thing is that like the way that Vista is set up, and this is the positive thing. There's a lot of negative. There's a lot of negative. Don't -- I'm not dismissing all the negative, but the positive thing about Vista is (a) it will probably be backwards compatible to an extent. Not to a complete extent but to an extent, all right, and it will also -- it also has weird architecture where it's going to be seamlessly updating itself in the background whenever you are connected to the internet.

MIKE PAYNE: I don't like that.

DREW KRAG: That's freaky.

DAN AGOSTO: I don't like that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It is kind of freaky but it's also very convenient because you're not going to have to sit there and heal your Windows where it will do it automatically.

MIKE PAYNE: But the thing is if it's working fine as it is right now...

DREW KRAG: Exactly.

MIKE PAYNE: The updates can only risk the state of my machine.

DREW KRAG: That's true.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, but if you're running Vista, you're probably going to run into problems with the get-go.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Maybe. Maybe. Probably going to run.

MIKE PAYNE: So, your point about backwards compatibility between 98 and XP, it was seamless...

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: ...in my opinion. I mean I --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Two thousand was seamless too.

DAN AGOSTO: They did a really good job with that. But XP wasn't all that different from 98.

MIKE PAYNE: It wasn't. It really wasn't.

DAN AGOSTO: Or with 2000 like I can't, you know. If someone sat me in front of an XP machine like had the classic start menu and a 98 model, I probably wouldn't notice the difference for a while.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Uh huh.

MIKE PAYNE: Okay.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, I mean but that's what Windows does really well. I mean if they true -- because like remember the Mac thing. Just think about like, you know, you have to boot in OS 9 like you can't run any classic programs in OS X like you cannot.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. That is -- And also, Mac, you know, when they went to the G5, you know, all new peripherals, as far as PCI cards they went to the PCIX, I don't think that's really happening but I mean when we get to 64 I mean new peripherals will be 64-bit.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: I mean one of the comments I had, basically with my personal opinion, I'm not going to upgrade to Vista on my machine. I have a Pentium IV 3.2 GHz and I don't plan on going anywhere with it. I'm totally happy the way it is, and since I've gotten the machine, I've never ran any of the service updates for Windows. I've always kept it the same since my system began to work the way it is.

DAN AGOSTO: Me, I have regressed. I went from Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 1...

MIKE PAYNE: Did you?

DAN AGOSTO: ...because Service Pack 2 introduced a lot of problems with MIDI drivers.

MIKE PAYNE: Okay.

BRITTON WETHERALD: See, here's the thing though. This is the main kind of focal point that I'm trying make. There's a lot of musicians like us in recording, people like us, will stick with their machine the way it is because it is not economically affordable to go, "I'm going to go buy a new computer. I'm going to do all these upgrades to it just to get to Vista," just to get minimal feature. You know, it's like you just want your DAW to record the way it's supposed to record. That's what I want.

MIKE PAYNE: And that's why I think that many of us may stay exactly where we are now. I will move to Vista but only when I get a new machine.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, exactly.

MIKE PAYNE: And to that --

BRITTON WETHERALD: You only want it to do that when it's required.

MIKE PAYNE: And to that, when you were mentioning the specs that's needed to run Vista, it might actually be a good thing that the specs are so high that you need such a strong machine to run that because two years down the line in running Vista, you know, you can really take advantage of all that it --

DAN AGOSTO: In -- I've been reading up on some of the advantage...

MIKE PAYNE: Sure.

DAN AGOSTO: ...that Vista brings and of course it's the security advantage, but then pretty much everything else is just like GUI, you know. It's graphical stuff, usability stuff. I don't need that as a power user of Windows.

MIKE PAYNE: Right. Right.

DAN AGOSTO: And this brings up an important point that I have not seen anywhere. I mean someone probably brought it up but I haven't seen it, but there is actually a video on Gearwire.Com and also an audio interview with Bill Patrick, president of Rain Engineering...,

BRITTON WETHERALD: Okay. Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: Uh huh.

DAN AGOSTO: ...Rain Recording Computers, and he, you know, he works with the Microsoft guys like all the bigger companies do...,

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: ...and he is saying that basically Windows Vista -- You guys, Windows X64?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: That's the architecture for 64-bit computing for Microsoft, and basically, for one reason or another, Microsoft didn't want to push this as hard to its developers, and so people were waiting for Vista to come out before they released their 64-bit drivers, and the thing is that Vista is basically built upon this skeleton of Windows X64, which is a bunch of GUI-like updates, and it'll take up more space, and I think the answer, according to Bill Patrick, is, you know, Windows X64 for media people, you know, because it's going to require less resources of your computer so you can put all those processing resources towards, you know, processing your media, towards running VSTs, and it supports -- I also, another thing, it supports, you know, tons of RAM, and I think they haven't done this on a personal machine but like in their labs, he mentions that they have like 128 TB of RAM running on like one of the, you know, liquid-cooled machines, you know.

DREW KRAG: Holy crap.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I just -- I really wonder what the market share for like -- what the market share of recording kind of based applications for computers are right now, because a lot of sounds like, you know, these -- This is a brilliant idea, "Hey, I have a media-based, you know, version of Windows for all the people who do video and," yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: That's what they're saying. That's what Bill Patrick was saying [OVERLAPPING]

MIKE PAYNE: [OVERLAPPING] That's what Bill Patrick is saying [OVERLAPPING]

DAN AGOSTO: Like I mean that's not necessarily what X64 is supposed to be but that ended up the role it's playing because it's basically a bare bones version of Vista.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, and --

MIKE PAYNE: Before we move on, I wanted to -- You mentioned how Windows Vista is basically a GUI update and not entirely...

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: ...but that's one of the main selling points of it.

DAN AGOSTO: In essence, you know, that's -- you could say that, you know, we'll classify it as a GUI update.

MIKE PAYNE: I'm running XP at home and if you looked at my machine, you would think it's Vista. I've a bunch of skin updates. I've got a Mac dock at the bottom...

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: ...and I can scroll through my apps just like that.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I've heard about that.

MIKE PAYNE: And it's not taking like a significant toll on my processor at all to run this and my PC looks sweet.

DAN AGOSTO: But I think you would have -- you might have some performance and, you know, heightening if you were to get rid of those stuff. You might find that you could render quicker or run more VSTs, but you're running Pro Tools anyways.

MIKE PAYNE: I'm running Pro Tools, yeah, and I've not had a single problem. Yeah, it's kind of fun.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I mean at least they're not changing their whole language architecture like the OS 9, the OS X sort of thing.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. [SOUNDS LIKE] They knew.

BRITTON WETHERALD: So basically, the whole problem with OS 9, OS X is that they changed the whole architecture.

MIKE PAYNE: The skeleton, if you will.

BRITTON WETHERALD: The skeleton.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, the skeleton.

BRITTON WETHERALD: From Unix -- From their previous to Unix or an OpenBSD sort of thing and this is nothing new. I mean evidently there's, you know, HP has developed same Unix-like platforms. Not classically Unix but, you know, they're --

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It's sort of like calling Italian and Spanish like romantic languages as to calling BSD and -- what is -- AIX is another one.

MIKE PAYNE: That's a very good analogy.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, so I mean like that changed though really. I mean it offered for a lot of stability advantages, but during the transition of it, it was a huge, huge problem, especially with the Audio Unit's drivers, the way that they did audio. They got rid of the Open OMF, you know, the little MIDI driver implementation because of all these changes in the Unix system, so.

MIKE PAYNE: Next up, we'll take a look at the Ugo Audio plugins: the Ironhead percussion synthesizer and Tunguska, a morphing multi-effect plug that comes along with Ironhead. Let's take a look.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Let's take a look.

DAN AGOSTO: So this is Ironhead from Ugo [PRONOUNCED "OOH-GO"] -- Ugo [PRONOUNCED "YOU-GO"], not sure exactly how you pronounce it, bu anyway it's a drum synthesizer, and what -- basically, you have all these different types of sounds and then it classifies it "Thud" (sort of the kick), "Whack" as sort of your snare. There's "Thud".

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW NOTES ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: I'm going to turn off the delay really quick. Okay, so when you hit that one note...

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW NOTES ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: ...you can see it's triggering this note. That's Thud 1. You control the volume of that. This is also delay send; you can control that. You can control pan. There's multiple outputs on this. We're just going to have to go to output 1. And so, over here, we have these little XY pads. For the Thud, you have tone, noise, and envelope. So, if I start moving around the Tone knob (actually, we're on tone A -- all right -- so you can hear the kick change in tone, then again change in noise.

DREW KRAG: Sounds like it's changing the pitch a little bit too.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah it's -- the tone will. I think there is just a standard sound in there. This is sort of like a filter.

BRITTON WETHERALD: There's one standard oscillator?

DAN AGOSTO: So, it seems like up and down on this pad changes the pitch.

DREW KRAG: Yeah, I hear that.

DAN AGOSTO: Left and right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Filter.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A RHYTHMIC PATTERN ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: It sounds like it could be a filter, but noise of course gives you more thwack and also does pitch. Pretty cool. And then envelope, if you want to keep on hitting that, you can make it, if you hit on that Thud still, you can make it like a long envelope, real short, and it's also kind of make it like a sort of swell in. So basically you get a lot of different sounds. And then there's also -- This is pretty cool -- there's a B sound for every sound. So, you can have your setup for A, so here's our setup for A, and then we can also have a B sound, and I'm going to switch it to B so we can have a completely different kick sound.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A RHYTHMIC PATTERN ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: And then what we can do is -- you can see this morph button, and you can turn it on and off, and you control morph with an LFO in this section over here, and this is a tempo-synced morph, so what I'm going to do is turn the LFO on, and you can hear it sort of changing, and you can change the speed...

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A RHYTHMIC PATTERN ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: ...or you can slow it down of course, and you can change the waveform as well.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A RHYTHMIC PATTERN ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: And now it's just going up and down, and now we got like a triangle, there's different ramps, there's also a sample and hold. We turn the speed up and we'll see that more. So you can kind of hear that. Let's mess with the snare sound. Can you just start hitting that snare sound?

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: So, and that's different. This one only has tone and envelope.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: You might pitch it down a bit...,

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: ...and now I'm going to go to the beat sound.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right so [OVERLAPPING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Look out [PH] Pharell. We're coming for you now with these drum beats.

DAN AGOSTO: So, that's a completely different sound, and normally we'll just let it -- Just hit the snare just alone.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: So now it's just basically...

BRITTON WETHERALD: [RAPPING] Drop it like it's hot. Drop it like it's hot.

DAN AGOSTO: ...changing the sound like, you know, as it goes. I'm going to turn on the delay, give it some delay.

[MIKE PAYNE PLAYS A FEW SNARE HITS ON THE UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD, DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DAN AGOSTO: So, it's kind of a cool little drum synth. So, what I'm going to do now is take that MIDI file from last week that you made, though that we made after, you know, quantizing and all that. So, I'm going to take this, your hair metal thing, and actually let's listen to what it sounded like before.

DREW KRAG: Oh dear.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH SESSION DRUMMER SOUNDS]

DAN AGOSTO: So, that's what we had there, and I'll just bring it down to Ironhead, and we'll listen to what it sounds like there.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS]

DAN AGOSTO: Ooh, that's rough.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So what I'm going to do is open it up and open another preset.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Let's ride.

DAN AGOSTO: Try this hyper preset.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Let's ride the spooky.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS]

DAN AGOSTO: We'll try a few different presets. It's called hyper, jab.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS]

DAN AGOSTO: [WITH DISGUST] Ooh! Let's see if we can find that sound.

BRITTON WETHERALD: If we had something without a ride, that would be better.

DAN AGOSTO: That's clang. Okay.

DREW KRAG: Clang? [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: So, I'm going to change this clang sound.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS, TWEAKING CYMBAL SOUNDS]

DAN AGOSTO: That's better. I can turn down the volume, put some delay on it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS, TWEAKING EFFECTS]

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so --

DREW KRAG: I like the little tom fill in there.

DAN AGOSTO: [LAUGHING] Everyone loves that tom fill. So what I'm going to do is just grab it and loop it, and we'll check out Tunguska really quick. Both Ironhead and Tunguska come together as it lists like 20 bucks off the Ugo site, and we'll put the URL up, and this is just sort of -- there's a filter and a grain -- like a granulizer effect, so let's hear what this does to the drum sound after we loop it. All right.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS PROCESSED THROUGH TUNGUSKA]

DAN AGOSTO: So, adding some crazy grain effects here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS PROCESSED THROUGH TUNGUSKA]

DAN AGOSTO: So, there's like an XY control for grain, XY control for filter, and again we have this morph option so we can see this is -- we see this LFO going between sound A and sound B, and we can actually look at where sound B is, turn morph on and off for either grain or filter so now it's all morphing. We can turn up the speed of the LFO.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH UGO AUDIO IRONHEAD SOUNDS PROCESSED THROUGH TUNGUSKA]

DAN AGOSTO: So that's one preset. We got a bunch of others, that's called squishy.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I did remember [SOUNDS LIKE] GM power tools for Pro Tools. You know what I'm talking about? Where they have that morph setting on all their stuff? They have like a little bottom thing where you can actually set a time to morph things so it's not like just like morph. Pshew! Done. It's like morph and it'll slowly mix it a swell it into the other preset. It's pretty cool.

DAN AGOSTO: Well, I think it's kind of what this is doing. I just want to -- We'll move on really quick but I just want to hear what it sounds like on regular drums. All right. So I'm going to take this plugin and put it on some regular sounding drums, some acoustic sampled drums, and see what it does.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH SESSION DRUMMER SOUNDS PROCESSED THROUGH TUNGUSKA]

DAN AGOSTO: So, it's kind of a way to space out on your regular drums, and if we wanted to, we could double this tempo and turn it like into total hip hop so it would be 260 tempo and --

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH SESSION DRUMMER SOUNDS PROCESSED THROUGH TUNGUSKA]

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's more like punk.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK MIDI FILE FROM PREVIOUS CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH SESSION DRUMMER SOUNDS PROCESSED THROUGH TUNGUSKA]

DAN AGOSTO: I don't know. I think it's a pretty cool synth.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Go on.

MIKE PAYNE: Nice. That's Ugoaudio.Com, U-G-O audio dot com, and check those guys out. So last, it's time to make some hair metal. Each member of the Crosstalk crew died a little inside last week where we were recording a hair metal bumper for the Gearwire videos.

DREW KRAG: That ain't no joke.

MIKE PAYNE: But it was all in good fun and we're here to finish it up live on the air in a good, old mixing session.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay. All right, so we're going to be using Blue Cat's Dynamics. Have you guys seen this stuff at all?

MIKE PAYNE: No.

DAN AGOSTO: Blue Cat's dynamics plugins?

MIKE PAYNE: No.

BRITTON WETHERALD: No.

DREW KRAG: I've seen it. I haven't heard it.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. These are actually pretty cool. I was messing with these. This is basically just a sidechainable compressor and you can see the compression curve that I've already set up on our drums, and so basically what I've done is I've routed our drums to a bus and then put the processor on there, and what I'll do is I'll bypass the effect as soon as I loop it, and we'll hear it dry first, and you guys just tell me what do you think of the sound quality. We'll solo that. Okay.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK FROM CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION PROCESSED WITH THE BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN BYPASSED]

DAN AGOSTO: So that's our -- this is bypassed, and I'm going to turn it on. It's sort of solo right now but it's here I bumped it up.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Mmm hmm.

DREW KRAG: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: So, if we looked at this plugin, we got a sidechain filter so what I'll do is I'll lower the threshold of the compression curve so it's a little more obvious, and what I want to do now with the sidechain compression is make it so it's just going off the kick, which is compressing off the kick, so I turn on the listen and now we're just going to be listening to what we're filtering out and what's going to be feeding the compressor.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK FROM CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's sweet.

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so turn that up, so now we can hear that it is still compressing. This is clean, and this is --

BRITTON WETHERALD: You can kind of hear the modulation a little bit.

DAN AGOSTO: You can, you can. What we can do to prevent that, here we got a mode.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: You can change to VCA mode, kind of makes it a little more transparent.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: A little bit.

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: It's got a stereo spreader so you can flip your stereo image. This one is called max.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah, in there. Right there.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. You can hear it loop every single time. It modulates in the same place.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Minimum sort of squeezes down your stereo image. Average I think keeps it, just spreads it out a little bit perhaps, not exactly sure. There' also an oversampling knob. Right now, it's two stages of oversampling and what this does is it affects the filter mostly I think, the sound with the filter.

BRITTON WETHERALD: They seem like very in-depth plugins but nice at the same time.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, and they're not so expensive, so [OVERLAPPING].

MIKE PAYNE: How are they in processing?

DAN AGOSTO: Right now, I got like 42%. I got a filter on, I got a sidechain filter on, and I'm doing some pretty heavy compression.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's good.

DAN AGOSTO: But let's take a listen to --

BRITTON WETHERALD: Isn't that Roger Nichols stuff?

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on the high cut filter, so here's completely open. It's at 22 Hz.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Okay.

DAN AGOSTO: So here's closed, and we're oversampling, and if I needed a little bit of, you know, a little more space on the CPU, I'll turn down to oversampling but listen to what it does to the sound especially when the filter is on.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK DRUM TRACK FROM CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

DAN AGOSTO: Did you hear that all? I'm going to switch back and forth to zero. Just two. Mostly the cymbals. I'm going to turn the sidechain filter off for now, and just turn up the gain a little bit so we can hear it.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, it opens it up a little bit.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It actually -- basically all that does is it creates the frequencies -- it allows the frequencies above, you know, the sampling rate, to go through.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: It's very subtle but it is a very nice option to have.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. it' very useful when you really need those harmonics.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Like if you were doing guitar, it would be extremely important like the cymbals got a little more life with that.

DAN AGOSTO: Over here in the mode section, you can switch between VCA and Opto. VCA is a little more like your '80s sound, what you're going to find on like an SSL board.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Or Neve.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Opto is like opto circuit, adds some more distortion.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's like your Gem Equalizer.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, and then over here you got peak and RMS. I believe this is just sort of like the response time, the response to the peak, you know, whether the sensor circuit is looking at the peaks or the average loudness. If you turn this up, it's going to become a little slower and a bit heavier of a compressor.

DREW KRAG: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: I kind of like that for the sound. You have to turn on the post gain though, and over here is actually our controls for our dynamics.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Mmm hmm.

DAN AGOSTO: This has a gate or expander as you can see. As I turn up the threshold for the lower curve, you can actually gate out some of that stuff. If I turn the ratio down, it'll do expansion instead of gating, and there's also knee control but we don't need that in this case. Over here, we have an upper curve control that's basically compression. We have our threshold, ratio so we can actually do reverse compression, or that's actually expansion as well in a sense, but we're going to leave it about there, and our knee control so we can kind of round off the curve. Now we're constantly compressing basically but to a lesser degree.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What's the price tag around that?

DAN AGOSTO: This thing? I think the entire bundle sells for about 50 bucks.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, that's areally good deal.

DREW KRAG: That is a good deal.

MIKE PAYNE: Wow.

DAN AGOSTO: And yeah, there's a few -- I believe this is the only -- This is just 50 bucks right here.

MIKE PAYNE: Mmm hmm. Okay.

DAN AGOSTO: One other thing -- a couple of other things on here. If we do some really heavy compression just like completely slam it and turn the ratio up more and turn the knee down, so we're just -- this is just totally slammed like all the time, you can hear that. You can mix between wet and dry.

MIKE PAYNE: That's good. Hmm.

DREW KRAG: That's cool. That's good

DAN AGOSTO: So now we have that compressed sound mix for the other one, and there's also limiter. You can switch between a hard and soft one whether that's harder, that's softer, basically attack time, and here's the release time.

MIKE PAYNE: That's sweet. That's really cool.

DAN AGOSTO: So, it's pumped up really [OVERLAPPING] quite a bit.

DREW KRAG: Mmm hmm.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah it's good. It's good. I mean like honestly -- I mean for the -- for what it is, for 50 bucks, it sounds awesome. I mean like I was just thinking about it. As much as I hate Roger Nichols and as much as I hate the way those plugins operate, they do sound good for exorbitant amounts of money, but I'd put my money on that any day.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay, so we have our drums sounding all right. Now we're going to go into -- we're just going to see how it sounds with the rest of the mix.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH DRUMS PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

DAN AGOSTO: I'm kind of a [INDISCERNIBLE] your vocals for now.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Please do yourself. [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right.

MIKE PAYNE: It seems like the guitars are a little loud.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What? [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: It seems like the guitars are a little loud.

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: [OVERLAPPING] down a little bit.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so our guitar tracks...

DREW KRAG: That's not me here. That's not me.

DAN AGOSTO: ...right here, I'm going to group these guitar tracks and just sort of bring them down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION WITH DRUMS PROCESSED THROUGH BLUE CAT AUDIO DYNAMICS PLUGIN]

DAN AGOSTO: No. That's bass. I'll leave the solo track up a bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Cool.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

BRITTON WETHERALD: [SCREAMING] Ow!

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so this is bringing back memories of last week.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Dude, it's really '80s. I mean it's really '80s.

DAN AGOSTO: This is the mixing process, yeah. Listening over and over again to music...

BRITTON WETHERALD: The same. Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: ...you may not necessarily like.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's --

DAN AGOSTO: I'm going to solo these guitar tracks, and I'm going to send them to a new guitar bus. To do that, I'll just choose track properties>output and then send those three to guitar, and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to EQ all these guitars together.

DREW KRAG: Interesting.

DAN AGOSTO: And to do that, I'm going to go to our Blue Cat. Let's do the Stereo Parametric EQ, or actually the Parametric EQ Stereo.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: All right [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: [LAUGHING]

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

MIKE PAYNE: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: So, as you guys can see, this is a standard parametric EQ.

MIKE PAYNE: Right.

DAN AGOSTO: I'm going to go ahead and do turn on each band.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It reminds me a lot of the Waves design of things.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. Uh, this kind of reminds me of the Waves design up here.

MIKE PAYNE: Their Q10.

DAN AGOSTO: So, for guitar I kind of like something around 1000 Hz sort of that telephone frequency, maybe a little higher to get them to kind of cut through, and right now I should be EQing these in the mix, so what I'm going to do is I'll bring back the rest of the mix.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

DAN AGOSTO: And I'm just going to EQ until I start to really feel that guitar.

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's got to bump a little four in.

DAN AGOSTO: 4k?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. Just a little.

DAN AGOSTO: All right, so I'll bring a little bit of 4k -- Oh, not 4k. Four hundred Hz or 4 [OVERLAPPING]?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, 400. Sorry.

DAN AGOSTO: Four hundred. Okay.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I was like what --

MIKE PAYNE: Same thing.

DAN AGOSTO: Let's see how that sounds.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

BRITTON WETHERALD: I just want to see if it kind of gives it some low end.

DAN AGOSTO: Basically, you can see all it's doing is adding some extra mid end, or just mid range. I'm going to lower the low shelf just because we don't really have anything whatever we want, and a good thing about being able to turn each band on and off is you can listen to what we're doing, so you really don't hear much of a difference, but since we're getting rid of that, it's good. If I were to go up higher, you start to hear that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Ooh.

DAN AGOSTO: We can listen to just what we're doing with that one, that particular band, so I'm going to turn it back down to around 143, make sure that we're not cutting out anything we want. All right, that's good.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Now the bass is going to take that place.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, that's where the bass lives. Let's try moving up some of these highs. Nope we don't like that.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: There's plenty of high end in that guitar. Let's try taking out a little bit, and moving up our shelf.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

DAN AGOSTO: Maybe let's do it at that. Makes it a little smoother I think and just bump up the gain just a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, ADJUSTING EQ FOR GUITARS]

DAN AGOSTO: And maybe a little more of that 400 to get those rhythm guitars standing out.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Try moving the 1k to like 1.5.

DAN AGOSTO: At 1.5?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: You know, the 1k is actually at 1.6.

BRITTON WETHERALD: All right.

DAN AGOSTO: You want to move it up some more?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Just a little.

DAN AGOSTO: Expect 2k.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. It's not really noticeable. I mean it's --

DAN AGOSTO: Well, I mean you can hear what it's doing. It's obviously doing something and I think you like that.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. Cool.

DAN AGOSTO: So, we've Q'd the guitars using that one. We'll bring it down a little bit here. Okay, cool. And what else we're going to do? Let's add some of this MS EQ to the drums, and what this MS EQ does is called the widening parametric EQ. It looks a lot like the other EQ.

BRITTON WETHERALD: But it's got more.

DREW KRAG: Yeah. Nice.

DAN AGOSTO: Well, it's got two channels, but the channels are not traditionally like left and right. The top one is your middle channel and the bottom is your side channel.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Oh yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So, if we press play, we can sort of effect what's in the middle, so let's say we want to, on our toms which are panned stereo, what we want to do is add like 100 Hz so that they start to ring out, and on those fills, instead of being like [IMITATING DULL TOM SOUNDS], they'll be like [IMITATING BRIGHT TOM SOUNDS]. That's kind of what we want. So what I'm going to do is just bump up 100 Hz on the side channels, and you can hear that it's really not doing anything -- or actually I just turned it off -- It's really not doing anything to our kick or snare. Can you hear that?

BRITTON WETHERALD: It's not. Yeah. It's creating some added saturation but it's doing very minimal.

DAN AGOSTO: It's doing something but it's very minimal.

MIKE PAYNE: [OVERLAPPING]

DREW KRAG: [OVERLAPPING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: [OVERLAPPING]

DAN AGOSTO: It gets our toms, which I think is cool.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's a very cool plugin, right? Just right there.

DAN AGOSTO: And our mid band, our middle section, what I'm going to do is turn up some 80 Hz because that's where our kick is, and it's really not going to do too much to our toms.

MIKE PAYNE: You got to turn it on.

DAN AGOSTO: That's one thing about this plugin. You got to turn on a band before it starts to work. Turn up the bandwidth.

MIKE PAYNE: Actually that's affecting the bass too.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah, because I have the bass on this too. So what I'm going to do is actually put the bass on its own bus. To new stereo bus, all right.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

DAN AGOSTO: So now I'll be able to bring out the kick drum. You can already hear that's happening. That's off. That's on. Turn it up some more.

DREW KRAG: There you go.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You got that beater head.

DAN AGOSTO: And let's say I just want to add some 5k to the snare. I mean I could go and do this individually...

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: By rendering out each drum by itself but why am I not going to do that? Because it takes too much time. So, I'm going to turn on band 5 in the middle band, and that's actually a little too much on those toms so I want to turn that down a little bit, and back on our mid band, I'm going to go up to about 5k, and it's really not affecting our ride too much. It's affecting it a little bit but minimally, and it's really bringing out that kick.

MIKE PAYNE: Snare.

DAN AGOSTO: Or not the kick, the snare.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

MIKE PAYNE: Can you turn it off for a second?

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: I'll turn off the band.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: You're losing some of the bass on that snare that I think really kind of adds to it.

DAN AGOSTO: See, if I start adding like the part of the snare I want to add like 400, it'll start bringing up the kick drum too, and then it'll cover up the bass guitar.

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's true.

DAN AGOSTO: All right, cool. What else am I going to do? Well, let's go back to our bass and put a little compression on there.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Oh, not here. That's your vocals.

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. Let's please just not ever talk about that ever again. It's like going to embarrass me.

DAN AGOSTO: It's going to be on the end of every one of our videos. So, I'm going to go to the monophonic dynamics.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well, they can deal with it. I don't want to deal with it.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: And I'm just going to grab a preset here, bass boost, and we raise the threshold a little bit, turn off the auto gain because what auto gain does is whenever you turn down the threshold, it gives you make-up gain.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I don't like that.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I'm not a big fan of that myself, but it can help, you know, if you want to do something really quick. So that sounds all right for our bass guitar. Sounds good enough.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION]

DAN AGOSTO: As it sits in our mix, maybe give it a little more volume. I'll probably EQ that if we got more time. Anyway, I think our keyboard sounds all right.

MIKE PAYNE: I'd drop the volume just to touch.

DAN AGOSTO: On the keyboard or on the bass?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. On the keyboard.

DAN AGOSTO: Ha ha because you played it?

MIKE PAYNE: No, I just -- I don't feel that it entirely fits with the rest of the track.

DAN AGOSTO: All right.

MIKE PAYNE: But it might be good just to see where it would lose the mix.

DAN AGOSTO: I would probably change...

BRITTON WETHERALD: The patch.

DAN AGOSTO: ...change the patch.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. That would be sweet.

DAN AGOSTO: Or change the effect entirely.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Go for that Oberheim-like Van Halen sound.

DAN AGOSTO: Well, what I'll do is I'll bring out one of my standards that I always go to, and this is the Dreamstation that comes with Sonar, most versions of Cakewalk software. What we'll do is we'll find a pad.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Jump [IMITATING THE SYNTH RIFF FROM VAN HALEN'S "JUMP"]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: That's all Oberheim. That's all the Oberheim stuff, man.

DAN AGOSTO: You want to click on some keys?

MIKE PAYNE: Sure.

[MIKE PAYNE AUDITIONING SOME SOUNDS ON THE DREAMSTATION WITH DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DREW KRAG: [LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Is that what we're looking for?

MIKE PAYNE: No.

DREW KRAG: Pretty close. Similar.

DAN AGOSTO: Getting closer.

DREW KRAG: More paddy, right?

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. More paddy.

[MIKE PAYNE AUDITIONING SOME SOUNDS ON THE DREAMSTATION WITH DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Like strings.

DREW KRAG: Close. Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: We'll raise the filter on this or add some FM modulation.

[MIKE PAYNE AUDITIONING SOME SOUNDS ON THE DREAMSTATION WITH DAN AGOSTO TWEAKING]

DREW KRAG: That's pretty close. It's better than I think what was there.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. It does work. Let's give it a try.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Let's do it.

DREW KRAG: Let's hear what that does.

DAN AGOSTO: We'll just reroute the MIDI track from the Cheeze Machine, which we had before, to the Dreamstation, and see how that sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, KEYBOARD MIDI TRACK REROUTED TO THE DREAMSTATION]

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: We'll mix it down.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, mix it down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING BACK ENTIRE CROSSTALK HAIR METAL BUMPER RECORDING SESSION, KEYBOARD MIDI TRACK REROUTED TO THE DREAMSTATION AND MIXED DOWN]

DAN AGOSTO: That's definitely closer.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah. That's a very close one.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah. Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: I'll mix it down a little more.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: All right. So --

BRITTON WETHERALD: I guess it totally worked out because I did not actually have to play anything. I would just sit there mess around with the POD.

DAN AGOSTO: Yeah. I think we got a pretty good mix there.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: So, what we'll do is --

MIKE PAYNE: What about the vocals?

DAN AGOSTO: So, we'll deal with the vocals later.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah, away from --

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: We don't want to subject you to that right now.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

BRITTON WETHERALD: Well subject you to it later.

DAN AGOSTO: What we'll probably do with the vocals is compress them, EQ them a bit, and put some reverb on them.

BRITTON WETHERALD: And maybe mute them.

[PANELISTS LAUGHING]

DAN AGOSTO: Then what I'll do is I'll edit it out, edit out, you know, certain parts and just kind of space it out within there, but you know we don't want to get into too much editing right now. We're talking about mixing.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah.

MIKE PAYNE: Yeah.

DREW KRAG: Yeah.

DAN AGOSTO: Okay.

DREW KRAG: Agreed.

MIKE PAYNE: All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening and watching. We will be back in a couple of weeks. We're going to take a break next week but thanks everybody for listening in and thank you guys, as always, for taking part.

DREW KRAG: Happy holidays.

MIKE PAYNE: Happy holidays, everybody.