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Bobby Owsinski

@bobbyowsinski

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Music Producer & Engineer
Author | 28 Books on Production and the Music Business
Podcaster | New episodes out every Tuesday

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Abbey Road had three interns who could handle anything technical. A knowledgeable engineer running the session. Gear that’s been part of some of the most important recordings ever made.

Dan McCormick knew before they walked in that the technical side wasn’t going to be the problem. What he was actually there to do was get the best out of four musicians over 48 hours in one of the most loaded rooms on the planet, while making sure they felt like they belonged there.

That’s a different job than engineering. It’s closer to what a great coach does. And it’s the part of producing that nobody talks about enough.

Go give the full conversation a listen, link in bio. 🎧 by @bobbyowsinski

The Empty Pockets spent nearly a year playing these songs live before they ever set foot in Abbey Road. That preparation was the whole point.

Dan McCormick’s approach going in was simple. No stopping mid-song, no taking the drums from one take and the second half from another, no safety net of edits to fall back on. You play the song all the way through until you have a take you love. Then you come back the next day and do it again if you need to.

Most albums are built piece by piece in the edit. This one was built the way music used to be made, from start to finish, in the room, all at once.

The full conversation with Dan is on my YouTube channel, link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski

One of the most common problems in home studio mixing is making something that sounds great in your room and falls apart everywhere else.

The three-level method is one of the most reliable ways to fix that. 💡

Mix loud for a few minutes to hear how the low end is actually behaving. Do most of your work at a moderate level. Then at the end, bring it down to almost a whisper.

Whatever is wrong with the balance will show itself immediately at that volume. Vocals too loud, bass disappearing, something crowding the midrange. You hear all of it when the mix is barely audible.

The full breakdown (+ forty-nine more Q&A’s) are in The Mixing Engineer’s Answer Book.

🔗 Out now at the link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski

Don Miggs isn’t soft-pedaling what the economics of the music business have done to the people trying to work in it.

A hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand songs uploaded every day. Writing sessions where you finish something and four more writers get added before it goes anywhere. Splits divided between publishers, managers, and co-writers until the original creator’s share barely reflects the work.

He understands why people get desperate. He understands why they stop playing fair, because the math stopped being fair a long time ago.

What he says his financial security allows him now is the ability to say no. Not to coast, but to be selective. To only take the records he genuinely believes he can make better. Billy Corgan pushed him toward that thinking directly, telling him there was no reason to release anything he didn’t fully stand behind.

The skill is still the advantage. Having money just removes the pressure that forces people to compromise it.

🎥 Full conversation with Don Miggs at the link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski

Don Miggs grew up in New York, spent time in San Francisco and Tampa, worked in LA, and eventually landed in Nashville. He’s had enough experience in different rooms to have a real opinion on how the cultures compare. ✈️

In LA the vibe drives the session. You can feel your way into something and come back tomorrow to finish the words.

In Nashville the craft drives the session. You get it right in the room, in the next twenty minutes, and you move on. Both approaches produce great music but they produce it completely differently.

What Nashville gave him that LA didn’t was a kind of productive urgency. A room that doesn’t romanticize the process. You finish it or you don’t, and there’s another writer walking in behind you who will.

🎧 Full episode at the link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski

The way Don Miggs tells the story of how he ended up producing a new Let It Be is almost absurd, and that’s exactly his point.

It started with Mick Jagger renting the house across the street from his LA studio. That connection led to Dolly asking him to pass a note to Mick for the Rockstar album. Which led to Dolly needing Ringo Starr and not wanting to call him directly. Which led to Don asking Mick Fleetwood, who also didn’t want to call. Which led to Ringo saying yes immediately when Fleetwood finally picked up the phone.

Somewhere in that chain, Don ended up as a producer on a track featuring the two remaining Beatles, Mick Fleetwood, Peter Frampton, Steven Tyler, John Fogerty, and Dolly Parton.

His takeaway from all of it was that every one of those people, when you got them in a room, was just a person. Nobody actually believes their own hype. Even the ones who act like they do.

🎥 Catch more stories from Don Miggs on the full episode, link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski

Over 29 years of producing and mixing, the same questions kept landing in my inbox, on the podcast, in coaching sessions, and even on the street.

The same ones, over and over, from mixers at every level.

So I wrote them all down. Fifty of the most common questions, each answered directly with the reasoning behind it so you understand why it works, not just what to do.

This isn’t the book you read cover to cover. The Answer Book is what you keep beside your monitors while you work.

Open it, find your question, apply it tonight.

📲 Link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski

Don Miggs had just dyed his hair blue at his son’s request, he’s colorblind so the choice was mostly a gesture, when Dolly Parton walked into his studio at 7:45am for an 8am session. Fully dressed, fully Dolly, driving herself. Nobody chauffeuring her in.

He says he got immediately embarrassed, reached out to shake her hand, and started apologizing. She took his hand, ran it through his hair, and told him never to change it. Her reasoning was entirely practical. The blue hair would do the work for him in every room. People would always remember the guy.

Then she explained why she shows up the way she does. Because everybody already knows it’s Dolly, and that recognition is something she built deliberately and protects.

She worked twelve hours that day with a twenty minute break. That’s Dolly for you. 🌟

Full episode at the link in bio. 🔗 by @bobbyowsinski

Don Miggs has spent enough time in writing rooms to know that one of the hardest skills in songwriting has nothing to do with creating. It’s knowing when to stop. 🛑

He talks about this in the context of self-editing, something he says most songwriters don’t develop until they’ve already left a lot of songs worse than they found them. The instinct to keep pulling at a lyric, keep adjusting a melody, keep tweaking a chorus that was already working, is one of the most common ways a good song gets destroyed before it ever gets recorded.

Music is like a sweater. Pull the wrong thread at the wrong moment and you go from something great to something you can’t even explain.

Listen to the full conversation with Don Miggs at the link in bio. 🎙️ by @bobbyowsinski

I am happy to announce, The Mixing Engineer’s Answer Book is finally here. 🎉

Fifty of the most common mixing questions, answered once and for all, with the reasoning behind each one so you can actually apply it when your session doesn’t match the example.

The same questions kept coming up for years across the podcast, my inbox, and in coaching sessions. This book is the answer to all of them, written down in one place.

Every question you’ve been Googling at midnight finally has a straight answer. 🙌

Link in bio to grab your copy. by @bobbyowsinski

Michael Morgan uses AI constantly in his coaching work and he’s pretty honest about what he sees when clients try to use it themselves.

Weak input produces weak output. When someone doesn’t really understand the components of what they’re asking for, they treat AI like a calculator. Put something vague in, expect something great to come out. Business strategy, branding, identity, none of that works that way. The quality of what comes back is almost always a direct reflection of the quality of thinking that went in.

Taste, judgment, and a clear sense of what you’re actually trying to build are still the most important things. The tool just amplifies whatever you bring to it. by @bobbyowsinski

Michael Morgan made a point in this episode that applies way beyond the mixing world… 👀

Engineers often come to him and say they don’t need the foundational work. They don’t need mindset, they don’t need positioning, they don’t need process. They need outreach. They need to know how to close deals. Just give me the thing that gets results.

His response is that handing someone the keys to a car before they know how to drive doesn’t have a zero percent success rate. Some people make it work. But the odds aren’t good, and the damage that happens along the way is real. Every piece of a business system connects to every other piece, and skipping the foundational ones to get to the exciting ones doesn’t actually speed anything up.

📲 Full conversation with Michael Morgan at the link in bio. by @bobbyowsinski