Adobe Audition Podcast – Matt Stegner (transcribed by Sonix)

Mike Russell: Hey I'm Mike Russell from Music Radio Creative. And welcome to the Adobe Audition Podcast honoring 25 years of Adobe Audition in this series of twenty five episodes. I will interview power users of this awesome audio editing software. We'll reminisce back to the Cool Edit Pro days through to the introduction of multi-track editing and bring you right up to date with Adobe Audition CC and features like the Essential Sound panel. This show is brought to you by the Awesome Audio Gear Giveaway. If you'd like the chance to win my perfect audio creator studio setup, head over to MRC dot fm slash win and enter now. There'll be many prize draws every month with a final gear giveaway taking place at the end of September. That's MRC dot FM slash w i n for a chance to win. Good luck.

Mike Russell: My guest on this show is Matt Stegner. He is the Senior Quality Engineer at Adobe. He focuses on audio for Premier Pro and Audition. Now in addition to this very busy task he is also a studio owner. He's run recording studios in the past. He's a studio owner. He is an audio engineer as well and a record producer. So very often with the music industry. Delighted to have you on the show Matt.

Matt Stegner: Hi, how you doing?

Mike Russell: Very good indeed. So I'm excited to learn more about you and what you get up to. Let's start I guess as it's a podcast all about Adobe Audition celebrating the 25th birthday. Let's find out how you're using Adobe Audition yourself.

Matt Stegner: So I use Audition a lot for the two track editor or the editor part. It's. It really is. I've called it this before it's the Swiss army knife of audio tools. That editor could do a bunch of different things that I can't find other tools that do them as fast. So I use the separate conversion a lot. It's really top quality. I use the batch conversion a lot. The batch processing to convert simple things over. I do a lot of top and tailing of mixes that I do. I'll end up doing, the way I generally work is I I will do a mix out of the DAW that I'm using at the time which I use many different types of DAWs even Audition sometimes and I need to quickly talk until the file to get rid of noise, stuff like that. A lot of the mastering work I do I do in the Audition multi-track with the clip effects and the track effects it makes it so flexible you can do all sorts of things in Audition that you can't do in a traditional DAW or you would take a lot more time and a lot more resources to do in traditional DAW including I use outboard effects, outboard audio effects a lot of distortion boxes, some outboard compressors, some outboard EQs. I use those folded in with Audition when I'm doing my mastering work.

Mike Russell: So a very comprehensive overview of how exactly you are using Audition. And obviously I understand you are using it in a lot of your work in your projects that you work on but not only that as the Senior Quality Engineer with a focus on audia not only in Audition but also Premiere Pro I bet that is a task and a half. Maybe you can you can tell us a little bit more about that. Certainly from my perspective it seems every single release audio between Audition and Premier are getting closer and closer together. What's it like on a day to day basis in your role there?

Matt Stegner: Oh a lot of it is that a lot of that a lot of my day to day role is so so my background was on the Audition team I was on the Audition team for a long long time. One of the original members of that team and then was I transferred over to the Premier Pro team specifically with the task of trying to help them make all their audio better. So Premier Pro, its core has the most. It's more DAW-like than almost any Anelli that I know of. Plus some extra stuff thrown on top of that so it has more DAW-like features than any other application out there and that is a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways because a lot of users don't understand a lot of it all users don't understand how to use sends or inserts and things like that. Part of my job is to help users figure that stuff out. Part of my job also is to get portions of the code ported over to Premier and have all that stuff working together. There's been a big push on our side lately to have the interchange between Premier and Audition just go away just become nothing so you can just natively work in either one depending on the tool that you want to be working at. And that's something that you're starting to see the fruit of right now it takes a long time to get that stuff up and working. We're just starting to see it right now in the latest releases where you can open up projects from Premiere and have no interchange at all and that just requires plugging all the pieces together and rewriting certain bits of code and adding bits of code over here and over here and making sure that they talk to each other properly.

Mike Russell: Yeah I can only imagine what a mammoth task that is working on that but yeah it seems like you say every single release you're getting closer and closer and the fact that you can literally open now a Premiere Pro project inside Audition is pretty mind blowing in itself. And like also another recent feature that was released where you can you can scrub along an audio track and actually see the video updating in real time so you can drop in those effects and pieces of audio in exactly the right place which is which is great.

Matt Stegner: Yeah another cool thing that's that as far as that interchange has been going is the Audition team is able to do these do these innovative new ideas things like the Essential Sound panel or the auto docking things like that. So when the code bases start to get merged together we're able to then take those those ideas that were are vetted out and were close or created. And in Audition they will then put them in Premiere so that everybody can have access to them. So I've been handling all of that stuff too. So a lot of the cool new ideas that are of audio only initially if they work well enough and they will get put over into Premier too and a lot of what I do is shepherd that back and forth and make sure that that's all working properly.

Mike Russell: So OK so we've got a good idea of your role as the Senior Quality Engineer at Adobe working specifically with audio. So let's talk about audio production advice. What was some of the best advice you've received over the years on working with audio would you say?

Matt Stegner: Well for for mostly the audio advice that I've gotten for that has been working with bands I worked for a guy named Glenn Lorbecki who is in Seattle. He's a legendary audio engineer. You ask anybody and they go oh yeah I know Glenn. Anybody who's been working on audio for a long time and he ran a post-production facility here for a long time. But he also had some gold records on his wall for different various things that he had done. I interned for him and the one piece of advice that he told me and this is this is record producer not, this is yes this is more rec producer type idea. One thing he told me which I didn't really get at the time and now I really do understand what he was talking about is that you're a psychologist first for the bands that you're recording and a engineer second the engineering part has to be so solid that it's second nature and all that technical stuff has to be second nature and you just have you need to know how to get this sound or fix this thing or something like this. The hard part and where it separates the the good engineers from the bad engineers are being able to take a band who are getting put into a studio is a stressful situation unless you do it a lot and bands especially if they come in they're spending a bunch of money to record some music. They're stressed out and the band has interpersonal interactions with each other and they're not always perfect and sometimes they are arguing and you know then at the stressful situation of being in the recording studio with a clock ticking and money going you know dollars taking out of their pocket every hour. It becomes pretty stressful. So being able to navigate that was probably the best advice that Glenn ever gave me was was that you're an engineer you're a psychologist first and engineer second and you need to you need to have the engineering chops down solid enough that you can concentrate on the psychologist part more and all. I recorded lots of bands over the years and that absolutely was just the best advice I ever heard it was absolutely true. And it didn't make sense at the time but now I've done it just I've done enough records that I just like yeah that makes perfect sense. So

Mike Russell: You can really see how that slots into things and like you say you get to really know your trade. How to do the engineering side of things so that you can focus on the psychology. That's that's a really interesting tip really good piece of advice. I guess it translate really to to any anyone or any project you're working on whether it be you know in a recording environment, recording studio or working with voice talent or singers it's just like yeah being able to you know have that same rapport with them and just yeah get the best get that, essentially get the best work out of people, right?

Matt Stegner: Yeah and it absolutely applies to most everything you do in life. I can directly find a correlation between that and developing software which is which is my other half of my life. Half of it is you know recording bands running studio and what happens is developing a big software that releases every day being able to have the technical stuff down and not have to worry about that and deal with the interpersonal stuff because ultimately it's a bunch of humans that build all the software anyway helps every day with what I'm doing. So it's all that same skill being able to have your technical side completely down and you don't even have to think about it and then being able to work with people, that's ultimately what, what's the biggest skill is being able to work with people so

Mike Russell: Brilliant so I love that so it sounds like you have a lot of experience working on many different projects. I imagine you've come up against your fair amount of challenges Matt. What would you say is one of the most challenging projects you've ever worked on and why.

Matt Stegner: Once so each part has different challenges. Some are big some are small. Usually the audio aspects of projects specially in recording bands are minimal compared to those interpersonal types of things, getting the sonics, generally you stick the mic in the right place with the right mic preamp fire and you get the game set up properly. It's going to sound good as long as the drummer has tuned his drum set or in my case usually it's me tuning the drum set and the guitar amp is not buzzing and rattling and all that kind of stuff. Probably the biggest challenges though are putting lots of time into recording projects and then having the people skip out on the bill. That's one of the big challenges. From a technical standpoint the big one of the big challenges always and this is pretty common that I see is having overly loud cymbals and when your recordings are recorded drum sets one of the harder things to do as an audio engineer to get all the replays relationship right between all of Mikes everything and you tend to get people into the studio that aren't professional musicians at my level and they play in the studio like they would on stage which means they they just they just hit as hard as they can on things like cymbals and that turns into just a bunch of white noise then blasts everything and it makes recording a drum set more challenging and they're probably a little bit nervous and they're just trying to get a good take trying to get through without screwing up because they're watching the dollars tick down there in the studio.

Matt Stegner: So one of the problems I have all the time is just way overly loud cymbals especially for rock bands. They tend to wash on cymbals and high hats and those just turn into a big broad bit of a white noise that just last through every microphone you have on a drum set. So finding creative ways to get that down is probably the biggest challenge that I face on a regular basis in the studio. From a technical standpoint. So much similarly in all the other mics to the point where I've started I've started having different tools in the studio to block that. Did a band recently where I brought a pair of big wool socks I had from home and taped into the cymbals because I knew the drummer I'd worked with him before. I knew he'd be really hitting hard and writing the cymbals washing them out so I put it on them. Actually before the session even started he turned to an assistant engineer I had that was helping me out of the time and said Hey I know that masking tape something to my cymbals. Watch this and within five minutes I was taping socks to his cymbals to keep to keep his levels down. So

Mike Russell: That's like oh yeah you have to get creative with your solutions to make sure that the the audio sounds sounds perfect. So what about cool things obviously have a lot going on you were a studio owner yourself. You work on the premier pro Adobe Audition audio integration during the day. So a lot going on but is there anything else any other cool thing you've got your eye on at the moment that you'd like to work on in the future perhaps even a project you haven't told anyone about yet. That would really excite you for the future. What would that be.

Matt Stegner: I don't there's no secret projects going on in my life right now. There's a couple that I'd like finished just from that I've been working with a friend of mine and we've been working on a record for more years now. I'd like to see that Don it's at the tail end and being done now. The Sonics of it are very 60s oriented so it's going to be probably the best sounding record overdone I'm hoping that'll get finished soon. That's a very cool project and that's from a band called The sing song local band here. Something that in dream pie in the sky things I'd love to do is I'd love to work as a mixer in movies. I think that would be if I could pick any job and go and do it. I think that would be the one that I would find the most interesting right now. Or be a mixer for music full time too. As far as the software side being able to work in some of the newer artificial intelligence things that are coming out and watch the magic of that stuff happen because it really does look like magic when it works and where it can turn into a little bit. That kind of stuff. That's really the the the the dream of being the work on that type of thing. Brand new algorithms that are never been seen before. Is the the pie in the sky like oh this is very cool technology stuff to work on

Mike Russell: So how do you see for instance you mentioned artificial intelligence there and it is becoming more and more a part of our lives on a daily basis. How do you see that affecting the Creative Audio process in particular.

Matt Stegner: It'll just make it so. With the superfast advances are already happening and artificial intelligence will be able to algorithms and applications that are developed will be able to automate so many processes that audio engineers do now to make the hard engineering problem just go away and you'll be able to focus just on creative things. So examples will be while there is an example right now. In addition the the remix algorithm I don't know if he does that. It's amazing.

Mike Russell: It's amazing.

Matt Stegner: Yeah. When I first saw it I was like I was super dubious because I was like Oh I've heard I've been working around Altea research for a long time and I you work on software for a long time you see software and such broken the software and such broken states that it's almost laughable how bad it can be sometimes. When I first saw that I was just completely blown away because my expectations are so low and it was amazing and it just really made me realize how cool and how interesting some of the the salt solving some of these challenges will be for things. Maybe times when I mean this is going to be too far in the future where you'll be able to have a perfect transcript of a piece of spoken word and be able to edit it like you would a Word document and have the audio come out with the inflections and everything very very very good. We were actually doing these demos a little bit of that kind of stuff with some Macs demos we've done being able to classify classify different things say when you import a piece of MIDI into say like Eilish and this is just a hypothetical example you'd be able to audition would scan through it and try to identify different sounds and it would be like Oh at this point there's a bird chirping in the background or at this point there's a airplane flying overhead.

Matt Stegner: Would you like to eliminate that airplane and have algorithms then go ahead find this background noise and eliminate it and get rid of it. Being able to intelligently mix things together will be another example of this. There's any kind of common problems that we spent a lot of time today as audio engineers trying to fix will be basically solved within a few years I think we'll be basically solved in a few years and you'll be able to do then just focus on content you'll say oh this is what the person is meaning I hear edit that out really quick and you'll have these pristine recordings come out all from these intelligent algorithms that are figuring out what's going on and and fixing the problems for you. It's it's a very exciting time. We'll see innovation like you wouldn't believe in just of interest I think in just a few years. Yeah.

Mike Russell: That sounds amazing. Very positive message. Well I mean that's just my jaw was dropping as you would suddenly say Oh those things. It's like wow. Yeah editing takes and affecting audio having software like audition Paixao sounds and potentially eliminate them. This sounds really exciting and like you say it helps the creators those creative people just to focus on what they do best which is creating that content and having that fix for them without having to know everything about sound or you know get an audio engineer or even I mean the essential sound panel is definitely getting there in terms of you don't really need to know much in order to choose the presets there now and then set something up that sounds pretty good. But yeah I guess in the future that's going to be almost automatically decided for you and you can tweak from there.

Matt Stegner: Yeah that's it's an interesting question about the automations willing to take people's jobs away. Well it will not. It will change the nature of what audio engineers do. I think it will it will get people away from from these really rote tasks where they have to do really repetitive things and the audio engineers have to learn new skills new things that can't be automated. And maybe that's on the personal side maybe it's getting a better performance out of somebody as a coach and just and just doing a quick check on the technical then making sure that you know things are plugged in properly and then the algorithms will take care of the equalization and make it sound big and huge and the compression and all that kind of stuff. And the audio engineer will be more of a coach that's just an example to where this might end up going. But yeah the the it's it's an interesting time. We'll see some pretty major changes going out and we'll be hearing a lot better audio because of that. I think

Mike Russell: You go back to what you said at the start of the podcast. You know a psychologist first engineer second. Wow.

Matt Stegner: That

Mike Russell: So let's let's move back in time now let's look at your childhood and some of your first experiences with all of you in most cases. Many of us now of working in the order you industry in some form or another. We had an experience as a child with audio or recording audio playback audio whatever it was that made us think wow that's super cool. This is something I want to do for you. Well what was that experience. Back to the interview in a moment but if you want to in my perfect audio create a sense head over to MRC ghats FM slash when.

Matt Stegner: Well my background is in music so I was a musician first and then being just more naturally. Technically inclined or I haven't. I have a degree in music from the University of Idaho where I'm from I grew up in in northern Idaho. So I was a music education major for a long time and then switched the very end that just got to music essentially a performance degree. So my background was always in music and I would be the guy in the bands that I would be and that would be the only for track and record bands or be able to get through the technical setup of the P.A. system like that. So that's part of where my background came from. And so everything was informed from the music and from me and my my. Some of my earliest memories are my parents my mom my mom sings a lot. So she and me walk around the house singing and my dad has played and community bands and things like that lots are going to watch him make me bands and play and like good orchestras for Civic Theater type shows and I've actually done some of those. But probably one really distinct memory I have music related. That got me into the audio aspects of it and the sonics of it was my dad had a Hi-Fi player with a set of old Sony headphones and putting those on and he had a copy of Iron Butterflies and I got into VITTA which if you remember that record and this was an actual vinyl LP that he had which I still have the LP because he gave me all of his records.

Matt Stegner: One point one side of it is the entire song in a got to the beat. If I remember that correctly and the middle of that has a big long drum solo. And I remember putting headphones on and listening to the entire thing and being blown away with how it sounded for the first time ever because you could hear the drums in the studio with the reverb and and they were nice and punchy and trying to figure out how the drummer did that how the drummer played it and how the how it was recorded in the same time thinking with both sides of my brain. So that's probably one of my earliest memories of being interested in the the sonics of it. And again it's still and it all ties back to not only the technical aspect of it but the musicality and how the person did what they were doing. So it all ties together.

Mike Russell: So even from an early age you were listening and trying to deconstruct music and that's really really cool. So let's talk more about Adobe Audition. We've already obviously touched on it in many ways and you've spoken of some of the features in particular. You've alluded to do a beautician remix being an amazing feature that saving editors tons of time now rather than having to make slices in tracks they can just type in a time. NABL remix and boom you know they've got a 30 second piece of music or a two minute or 10 minute piece. But if you had to pick one feature in particular in the whole of Adobe Audition mark as your favorite what would that be for you.

Matt Stegner: So it's pretty obscure it's pretty small and it's pretty obscure but it saves

Mike Russell: All

Matt Stegner: Me

Mike Russell: The more obscure the better.

Matt Stegner: Saves me so much time when I'm working. When I when I mix I generally will mix special I'm doing rough mixes for the band. I will have one long session in my DAW with all of the songs with different marker points and then I'll do a general mix for time's sake because you've got when you were trying to mix an entire record of eight songs and he got only you know a couple of days to do it. You can't break out each song into it's on its own project so I do it all in one big session and then I'll render the entire session down for rough mixes to get good ideas. This is how the Janjigian sound so I can sound some business so I end up with a one long way file that has. All the songs in it and in a traditional dossing fruition it's really hard to cut that out to cut it up into small little pieces addition in the markers panel. You can drop a marker at the beginning and the end of each one of those sections. There's a little button that says Murdi markers. What it does is it then takes those markers and merges them into the range of markers converts them over into range markers and then right next to that button on the top of the marker panel is a.

Matt Stegner: Export range Merkur. And when you do that you can do separate conversions and you can do conversion to things like P3 or AC audio at the same time. So what would usually take a person quite a long time to cut out copying saved to a new file Mlambo and do that across you know 8 to 12 tracks finalized CD tracks you can drop a bunch of markers one button emerge and hit another button to export and you're done. And it's that little thing right there saves me hours every time I have to do a rough mix for a band and usually you go through four or five different rough mixes of the band saying oh no. Turn that up turn that down less reverb here more reverb here a little something here something there and it just that little workflow thing and it's all in the workers panel on the stair in the editor and the audition editor along the top of the Marcus Padley. It's amazing how much time that saves me. That's one of those obscure little things that it's probably never been written about in any article about audition because people tend to focus on you know whiz bang things but it's just these little workflow things that make omniscience so easy to work with.

Mike Russell: Totally yeah I agree. MARCUS Yeah definitely underrated you know. I mean Aevum when recording this podcast just being able to drop a marker in on the fly if it's a part of the show you need to go back to or pay special attention to or quote said or something interesting. You can just you can hit a key on the keyboard. So yeah I can totally relate to the value of Markaz in auditions. So what about. I mean that's already in itself a pretty good workflow but maybe you could share with us some more amazing workflows of yours or timesaving should cause you use inside edition.

Matt Stegner: I don't know about timesaving but as far as a good workflow I've been doing more mastering lately. Getting this so so in my studio I've wanted the part owners of the studio. We have a lot of engineers that work freelance out there and are then getting more work as a mastering engineer getting files up to the right level and adding some analog mojo to them to make a record sound finalized which I also really like because it's got some really heavy technical aspects to it too which satisfies my technical side of my brand and the one thing that audition does that no other data allows you to run clip effects and the full it's not just a single you know gain volume here or a preventative effect. It's for real time audio effects using the effects rack on clip level on an eclipse as opposed to on tracks. That is why that is an amazing workflow right there because you can. The way that I auditions engineering is direr I know this stuff from having been around with me about it. When you're not playing over that clip. The effects are essentially muted so you're not using the superior resources of that so you don't have to worry about using a really heavy type of compressor or sometime type of audio DSP some type of plug in their party plugin or something like that takes a ton of resources because once you get over that clip it's not going to it's going to not use those resources anymore.

Matt Stegner: So I can not have to worry about any of that. Real time audio. You know if you run to any plug ins and you start running out of DSP resources near your computer starting Rowenna. It's race. I just put everything on Klip effects and then if I need to rearrange clips if I need it. This song was actually second in the order of the CD instead of first backing to grab the whole thing move it over and not have to worry about any of that. So that clip effects which was I mean I know how we developed it because partially because that's how Kirmayer and Olly's tend to do it and we were trying to emulate some of that workflow when we created that forever ago. It's this hidden hidden workflow thing that you wouldn't ever think about but it ends up can it can end up saving you a bunch of time by working with clip effects and saving a bunch of resources and not having to pre render and balance things down and all that kind of stuff.

Mike Russell: That's an underrated thing. I didn't realize that. Yeah it's only draining resources from your machine if you are actually playing the clip at that time. As soon as the play head goes beyond that clip what you're saying is that those resources are dropped in their free and available again. Wow. That's super cool. I like that. I like that a lot. Yeah I don't often use clip effects I tend to do a full track effects but now you're making me rethink my process and perhaps me to be doing a few more klip effects where where it's appropriate especially in big multistrike sessions right.

Matt Stegner: Yeah. Yeah yeah. And if it keeps you from having to create so many tracks a lot of times too if you've got say a track that has sound effects on it and you have 4 different sound effects and you need to and this is an example and you need to have a different compression level on each one. Alternately what you do is you would automate that using a track effect and you would then if you had to move one of those effects you have to then find out way to move the automation over and how the whole thing happened. You can just add him as track of flex Azarias clip effects and they just live on the clip and you can move them around in the end it just it it's just a timesaving feature.

Mike Russell: That's really really good. So OK we've covered your favorite feature in Adobe Audition. Amazing workflows and shortcuts and even resource saving tips. But let's talk about resources and gear when creating audio particularly if you're a studio owner. So what would you recommend. Particularly you know we always love to hear about microphones and I don't know mixing boards possibly headphones. What kind of kid you using real life you know physical kit that you can touch and installed in the studio. What's going on for you Matt.

Matt Stegner: Oh what's. This could be another podcast. I'm got so in my studio. We've got a 24 track two inch tape machine. And we track to that almost exclusively. It gets a lot of use and the way we have it set up is that it's that the tape machine is just there for colored and the tape machine dumps straight into a digital daw. So when we're in the studio we'll track from the live room to my priest my priest go straight to the tape machine the tape machine is then mumbled straight into the door and then we monitor off the door. So the way that and it's it's an old MCI Sony MCI 24 track it's the one you see in all the big studios big thing looks like a washing machine lots of lots of meters and big two inch tape. So the way that we end up working as we get all the benefits of tape and all the benefits of digital will track what the what the way of working in the studio as a band will do a take and are recorded the tape machine and I'll tell the band okay guys it sounded pretty good when you come in here and we'll listen to it. And while the band comes into the control room and they listen down I will then plan the tape machine and record on the DA and I were record that take into the DA. And that is the take.

Matt Stegner: That is the master take not what's on that tape. So the advantage of that is that I can then use a single piece of tape or a couple pieces of tape which take two inch tape is actually really expensive especially for the type of independent bands that I and working with budgets are concerned. I use a single tape for the entire record or were in a lot of times multiple records because the master take isn't on the tape machine. It's actually in the door at that point. So that's yeah that's that's that's my workflow down at the studio. And then I do a lot of overdubs and just a digital route because with tape I've found the best sound for tracking to tape is is drums drums and synthesizers to boot drums really sound the best on tape because of the way the tape rounds off transit and hard edges stuff like that. Usually a singer singing a tape. I don't really notice much of a difference. A lot of guitars too unless it's really heavily distorted guitars you don't notice much of a difference. But the advantage of being able to work in Dawes's is huge. The flip side so the other end of that spectrum so that's when we work to tape. We have a large trunking named Sony 2000 causal and the studio that people have called that. It's called that Japanese because at the time Yamaha started getting Sony a Yamaha APM 2000 Yamaha was essentially copying the new style console of the time and they took their designs and implemented this console.

Matt Stegner: So that's what we have down there so that sounds really good to various 1970 we have basically 1976 in our studio and that's what we do and then we dump everything down to digital. The other side though at home so I have a little I have a mixed room I'm sitting in it right now at home that I use for mixing and mastering and at home. Probably the most important thing in here is the speakers I have got a pair of Noaman KS1 20s and they are amazing for untreated rooms and small rooms that you can sit close to the speakers. I audition a bunch of different speakers and then found these and just blown away. Leveland. So glad I got them. And then also I have to show you a picture of this. I have been getting into building gear a lot lately too so buying kits and soldering together as long as you can follow simple directions and just use some simple logic. It's a really affordable way to get into high end audio equipment. Couple like Kapi is a company that makes really nice Mike my campfires and API style. Ypersele everything they make the API so 3 12. My pre's they make 500 Jacques's so I've got a 500 series rack that I've soldered together myself and there bunch of cubes and just little color distortion boxes sitting right in front of me.

Matt Stegner: That's all right there and I use that for mixing a lot of times and mastering. I get a lot of jobs where people have been mixing in a DAW say pro tools or something like that and they don't have any outboard gear at all it's just all been with their headphones and their pro tools rig and they don't that hasn't touched a transformer the entire time so I'll run this one I'm Mashour and the signal back out and hit all the different Transformers I have and just to warm up the signal and get it MEISON. You know that that mentally sound and then run and then record that back into the computer. As far as headphones I just have some some decent. I'm looking at them right here. The very dynamic 87 70s. I use those. They have this low end so you can really hear what's going on the low end. Yeah I run a little subwoofer just a cheap subwoofer with my women's just so I can get that bottom couple octaves of sound so it's basically just a rumble. It's just a rambler for me so I can make sure that when I'm you know solo the kick drum that I am properly passing it so there isn't a bunch of rumble down there that's taking up frequency bandwidth within the entire mix. So

Mike Russell: Really cool stuff like this could be a whole new podcast just talking about

Matt Stegner: Felfe

Mike Russell: Gear. I really like it and you are painting a wonderful picture there of what your setup must look like. Like you say it really an image would do it justice. If you have any any photo you can share with me that I can put publish in the show notes to this particular episode that would be amazing because it sounds like you have something pretty cool.

Matt Stegner: Yeah I can I can send some someone or I'd like to our Facebook page which has a bunch of pictures and videos inside our studio. Yeah.

Mike Russell: Oh cool I'll be really good. Let's let's wrap up really with this this final question word ask you for that young person listening right now who's an aspiring producer or audio engineer and they want to get into the industry they want to maybe learn Adobe Audition and of course in today's world it's not just learning audition like you're really working on right now as he's learning the video editing packages like premie a pro after effects and all that sort of that kind of person right now who's at the very start of this journey. What would your best advice be to them.

Matt Stegner: Oh wow. Two question people are successful when they get lucky. A lot of success is luck. Which is it's you know it's cosmically kind of a kind of a hand. But but if you can what I've noticed is that you can actually affect that luck though you can you can essentially make your own luck if you just try to take every opportunity you can. You face everything as an opportunity to learn and an opportunity to network and meet new people. So if you're trying to break into a business of some sort into the if you trying to break into being an audio engineer or studio owner or work in software you if somebody asks you to do something to do it. Good take every opportunity you can so if an opportunity presents itself go ahead and jump on that opportunity and that's what I mean by making your own luck is if you do well even if you fail those opportunities you do well. Most of them you will get asked to do more think so more opportunities and more luck will come your way. So that's that's one thing that is in hindsight. I wish I could have taken this advice myself when I have. I wish I would have known this advice myself when I was younger or have taken even more opportunities to make more of those relationships. To then get more ingrained into a scene and then get more jobs out of that and then become have more experience which is just it's self-fulfilling.

Matt Stegner: It builds on top of that. So that's the promise. The first bit of advice I have is make make your own luck. Taking every opportunity you can. The other part and this is a technical thing is focused on being of the problem solve. That's that apply to any type of situation you're in. As an audio engineer as an editor if you're editing you know if you're editing podcasts for example and some problem comes up be able to diagnose the problem. Think about your options and quickly work around the issue to keep the flow moving forward. And this applies to everything. This is essentially what I do all day is when I'm in the studio I'm problem solving because you've got a thousand decisions that you need to make right. That moment when you're recording a full band because you've got 400 microphones to put up in software. When I'm testing I need to be able to quickly diagnose what the issue is and figure out whether this is a real issue. If it's an issue with an external thing like the ordering system if it's my source that's the problem whether it's an actual bug something like that. Ninga quickly diagnose those problems and work around them is paramount. That's that's my other my other piece of tentpole advice is being able to problem solve and problem solved quickly and well as is the other thing that will really help people out.

Mike Russell: That's brilliant I like that problem solve problems solve well. And yeah I mean you get places through luck but I guess the the the high the harder you work the more the more you you hustle and you get out there the more luck is generated is that right.

Matt Stegner: Yeah. No that's that's one way to think of it. Yeah Exactly. Yeah. When opportunities come try to take them because it'll always be a learning experience. And even if you mess it up you'll not do that mistake again.

Mike Russell: Wow. It's been a really awesome episode I've really enjoyed chatting to you and getting your insights not only into you know Adobe edition premiere pro how those two pieces of software are nicely integrating but also a look into the future with AI your experience in being a studio owner working with music and getting started. Obviously it's going to be one of those episodes I think that people are going to want to rewind and listen to again for those nuggets of information. But take the way you go into some of the more hidden features I think inside Adobe Audition. So a really good one and I really thank you for your time. For anyone who's listening now who would like to check you out and what you're up to in particular online. Where would you direct them to.

Matt Stegner: Probably for the studio probably to find us Facebook dot com mysterious red X studio and that's how you're going to find the studio and through that you can contact me and all my studio partners. You're in the Seattle area you need recording that would be a good place to go to. That's probably the easiest way to find us

Mike Russell: Brilliant. So that's Facebook dot com Ford slash mysterious red X studio. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Matt Stegner: Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is fine.

Mike Russell: That concludes this episode would you like an extra chance to win the awesome audio gear giveaway. Subscribe and review this podcast. Then melody tells the podcast that MRC dot FM for an extra entry into the awesome audio giveaway. Good luck.

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