J.R. McNeely on Mixing: Way More Art Than Science

J.R. McNeely has mixed more than 300 albums across nearly three decades, for Underoath, Relient K, TobyMac, DC Talk and a long list of others. He has a Grammy on a shelf, a nomination he cares about more than the win, and a stack of gold and platinum plaques he only hung up because his wife wanted them out of her closet. He is now senior mix engineer at Soundstripe, where he has lost count of the songs somewhere in the thousands.

Aaron Sprinkle came on an earlier episode to talk about writing songs for the catalog. This one is about what happens to a song after it is written.

In this episode of Soundstripe Sessions, Jeff Perkins talks to J.R. about the janitor job that came with a key to a professional studio, the Post-it note that got him his first staff engineering gig, why every mix he does starts with the drums and ends with the vocal, and how he knows a song is finished (he gives up).

Key takeaways

• He grew up under a recording console in Huntington Beach, playing with Hot Wheels cars while his dad produced records.
• He took a janitor job at 18 because it came with after-hours studio access, then figured out he liked being in the room more than being in the band.
• Every mix starts with drums and percussion and ends with the vocal. The client's rough mix gets exactly one listen, then it gets muted.
• A song is done when he gives up on it. "It's art. It's done when it's done."
• He was faster on a half-million-dollar console than he is with a mouse, and he does the same job now with plugins that emulate the gear he used to own.
• He has no idea which records will connect. Some of the biggest ones he mixed were an afterthought booked with almost no budget.

Listen to the episode

Hot Wheels cars under the console

Jeff: Let's talk a little bit about your origin story. Where did you grow up, and what got you into music in the first place?

J.R.: I was born and raised in Southern California, in Huntington Beach. My dad was a musician who eventually became a record producer and a studio owner, and that's kind of where the origins happened. I actually never intended to become a recording engineer and mixer. I was going to be a rock star. I discovered the Beatles when I was young, and Led Zeppelin and Queen and all those bands, and I got into rock bands. But because my dad had a studio as I was growing up, I was always the one who would record our demos. We would sneak in when my dad was gone. He and his buddies would go somewhere for the day and we'd sort of sneak in there and try to figure out how to make things work. I grew up in a recording studio. I would literally sit under the console with Hot Wheels cars while he was working. That was kind of our hang time.

Jeff: Was the studio in your house?

J.R.: It actually was, which was very rare in those days, in the early 70s. He and another legendary producer by the name of Fabor Robison became close friends. Fabor produced a couple of singles on my dad as an artist, and they eventually decided to create a studio environment, and they did. It was the real deal. It wasn't like you think about home studios now, where you think of a guy with a laptop, or even back then a little four-track cassette. No, this was legit. They had legit gear, a console, Ampex tape machines, the whole thing.

Jeff: So why didn't you record in your dad's studio?

J.R.: By that time he had shuttered it. He was trying to do country music in Southern California. I'm convinced that had my dad moved to Nashville, he would have been in the Hall of Fame. He was an immensely talented guy, and he was the most stubborn person you've ever talked to. He was going to go to California because that's where he loved the weather, and he was going to make country music there. There was no convincing him otherwise.

Jeff: Did you always feel you had more of a connection to the technology and the consoles than to playing? You play very well, but it seems like the craft you've developed over the years has really been around the technology and the mixing, taking all these elements of a song and bringing them together.

J.R.: In those early years, when I made that conscious decision that this was going to be my career path, I dove in head first. There are definitely a lot of technical aspects to what I do, but to me it's more of an art form. Mixing has always been way more art than science for me. Music should make you feel a certain way, and I discovered early on that manipulating sounds has a lot to do with the way somebody perceives music, or how it hits them and how it makes them feel. That's how I've always approached mixing. To me it's no different than playing an instrument. I used to work on big large format consoles, and it was like playing an instrument, moving the faders around and getting the music to dance together.

The janitor job that came with a key to the studio

Between the Hot Wheels years and the first record he mixed, there is a job that had nothing to do with engineering. At 18, a position opened up at a big Southern California studio, and they were hiring someone to clean the place.

J.R.: I took the gig because they said, look, from nine to five you clean toilets, you sweep floors, you do whatever we need, but if there's nothing going on after hours, you've got the keys, you can use the studio. So I took the job so I could record a professional demo for my band and get us a record deal. And after a few years of "what does this do, how does this work," and getting the guys in and recording, I just fell in love with being in the studio, and I had an epiphany that I loved being in the studio more than I loved being in the band. At that time I was 19, 19 or 20. So I quit the band, got real serious about it, and by the age of 21 I had recorded and mixed my first record.

Jeff: Now you get into mixing. Mixing to me is very intimidating, because you look at those boards and think, how do you learn that? And you're not coming up on it with computers. You're working on traditional 24-track, 48-track, and the digital stuff back then was tape based.

J.R.: For me, I had a leg up because I grew up in a studio. I had a basic understanding of signal flow and the way audio goes through consoles, just from hanging with my dad and asking him questions.

His dad had one rule about the studio at home: stay out of the control room.

J.R.: One day I came home from school and he said, "Come in here. Sit down." And I said okay. And he looks at me and says, "So, how did it sound?" I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, "Don't give me the BS. I know you've been in here. There were a couple of things that were set wrong." From that point he showed me a few things.

J.R.: But it was never anything I took seriously until I was about 18, when I got the job at the studio. They had this huge tape vault of all these old master reels of people that either hadn't paid their bill or whatever, these old tapes, and I would take a random one off the wall, go put it on the tape machine and start pushing up faders. What does this knob do? What does this knob do? How do I make this sound go through this thing? It was really just hours and hours of teaching myself and reading manuals.

J.R.: As far as the collective balance of how I figured out how to put it all together, I can't answer that, because to me it's something that's a way that I hear. It's not color by numbers, if that makes any sense.

A Post-it note with the alarm code

Jeff: So you're recording the demo in your spare time and doing janitorial services the rest of the time. Where did it go from there? The band, I guess, didn't quite break through.

J.R.: There's a group called Kansas, a very famous group from the 70s. In the 80s they replaced their singer with a guy named John Elefante. He had left the group in the late 80s, and he and his brother started a record label and some studios. John was kind of toying with doing this studio production album thing. He got a couple of other people to sing on it, but it was the first time he had sung on something since Kansas, and they called the group Mastedon. Long story short, the band I was in were interested in signing to their label, but it didn't work out. They knew me as a guitar player, because I played guitar in the band, but they had also heard that I played bass.

J.R.: One day out of the blue I get a call from John and he said, "Hey, we're putting this band together. We've got some gigs. We're going to go play the Cornerstone Festival, we're going to do some big things, and we've heard you're a pretty good bass player. Would you like to audition?" And I said yeah, sure, that'd be cool, when? And I'm thinking next month, next week. And he's like, "Tomorrow." So I'm freaking out. These guys at the time were doing some pretty cool things and I really wanted to work with them, even in that capacity. So I went and got the CDs, listened, woodshedded, and I got the gig.

J.R.: By that time, this is about 91, early 91, I was engineering at another studio. I'd gone beyond the trash guy. And I get a call from Dino one day and he says, "Hey, band rehearsal tonight, it's canceled. I need to talk to you. I need you to come to our studio." I said okay, cool. So I walk into his office and he literally hands me a Post-it note with the alarm code and the key to the building and said, "You work for us now." And I was like, okay, cool.

J.R.: From that point I started working on more recognizable, bigger records. And I had always planned on moving to Nashville anyway, because back then it was either New York, LA or Nashville. LA didn't hold any appeal because I grew up out there, and New York was just crazy. Awesome place, but crazy. So Nashville kind of made sense. One day John and Dino were hanging in their office and they said, "Hey, we're considering building these studios in Nashville. Would you go with us?" I was like, yeah, I was planning on going anyways. So they built some studios called the Sound Kitchen, and I was the first chief engineer at the Sound Kitchen when I moved here in 1994, and eventually went freelance.

Queen at the Forum, and a guitar glued to his body

Jeff: Who are some of your early music influences?

J.R.: The Beatles, obviously. And as crazy as it sounds, a lot of old country music, because my dad was a country artist. Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, Marty Robbins, George Jones, Waylon Jennings. A lot of that stuff I discovered before I discovered rock and roll. Then my sister turned me on to the Beatles and I kind of went, oh my gosh, this is the Beatles.

J.R.: And then, this is a true story, my sister, who is a few years older than me, and her boyfriend had gone to see Queen at the LA Forum, back in 1980. Queen was doing a four night stint at the Forum, and she came home and she's like, "I've got to take you to see this band. You've just got to go." So we lied to our mom and dad and said we were going to Disneyland, and we got tickets, and I went and saw Queen in 1980 at the LA Forum. I have vivid memories of that. Freddie Mercury coming out on top of Superman's shoulders singing "Bohemian Rhapsody," and all the lights and the smoke and everything. And I was like, I want to do that. I want to be a part of that, whatever that is.

Jeff: How old were you when you saw Queen? Were you eight?

J.R.: I was 10. I still have very vivid memories of it. It was a life-changing experience.

Jeff: Your first concert.

J.R.: It didn't suck, man. It was pretty cool.

Jeff: And when did you start picking up the instruments?

J.R.: My dad was an artist, so there was always a guitar around the house. But I wanted to be a drummer. I actually started out as a drummer. When I was probably eight years old my mom and dad bought me a snare drum and I just beat the hell out of it and drove them crazy. But drums were expensive, cymbals were expensive, and there was always a guitar around. I picked it up as soon as I was big enough to hold the thing. My dad showed me my first three chords, and from there it was glued to my body. Every waking minute I had a guitar with me. I would sit in front of the TV watching cartoons after school and play along with the songs, or the TV commercials, or whatever.

Jeff: Did you take lessons growing up?

J.R.: I never did.

Jeff: Your dad taught you a couple of chords and then you were off to the races.

J.R.: And the thing was, he was very hands off. He was like, look, if you want to do this, this is your thing, I'm not going to force my thing on you. My mom later told me that he would be listening outside the door while I was in my bedroom noodling around, learning Zeppelin riffs, and he'd tell my mom, "Wow, he's getting pretty good at this." That was pretty cool to find out later in life.

Where a mix starts, and where the vocal goes

Jeff: When you mix, you get lots of different elements of a song. Where do you start with your approach? You're given something rough, sometimes something more polished, sometimes a few tracks, sometimes hundreds of tracks. How do you start the process to assemble what you have and then get it to a point where you're like, okay, this is a finished song that can go out into the world?

J.R.: It always starts, 90 to 95 percent of the time, with the client doing a rough reference mix. Sometimes they're better than other times, but really my take on a rough mix is, hey, this is the song, this is kind of the vibe we're going for, take it where you can take it. So I'll listen to that one time, then mute it, and then start with the drums. I always like to start with the foundation. To me, drums and percussion are the concrete. That's what you place everything upon.

J.R.: Then it becomes an hour or two, sometimes longer, just finding a balance for all those things, getting everybody to sit somewhere. If I close my eyes, I want to be able to see that instrument. And then from there I add the bass, and from there it could be keyboards or guitars or anything. Vocals are typically last. That's just the way I do it. There are a lot of mixers who'll say, well, you start with a hi-hat or you start with this or whatever. But that's just how I work. That's just worked for me.

Knowing when a song is done

Jeff: So when do you know you're done with a song?

J.R.: That is the question that shall forever remain a question. My wife says that. How do you know a song is done? And I just say, when I give up. It's a matter of, I will chase something, the most minute details sometimes, little noises or little nuances that no one will ever hear, but that's just my OCD I guess. Maybe part of being a good mixer is that whole thing of just unrelenting, this has to be perfect, even though it never will be. So really, for me, a song is done when there comes a certain point where I'm sitting back and the light bulb goes on and it's ready. It's never really finished. It's art. You can talk to any artist that paints pictures. You talk to Picasso, I'm sure he could look at his art and find the flaws that nobody else knows are there. Treating it more like art than science, it's just done when it's done.

Jeff: Now, you've been editing for what, 30 years roughly?

J.R.: You mean mixing?

Jeff: Yeah, mixing.

J.R.: Recording and mixing. When I started in this business in the early 90s, typically when you did an album you were the engineer. You were the one that recorded all the tracks and then you were the one that mixed it. In the late 80s and mid 90s, the whole rock star mixer thing happened with Bob Clearmountain and guys like that, where people would specifically hire them just to mix. So it still feels weird to be called a mix engineer, because to me you're a recording engineer. You make music, and that's part of both, recording and mixing. But I've focused on mixing since I stopped doing tracking sessions around 2001.

From a half-million-dollar console to a mouse

Jeff: How has the technology evolved over time? You were talking about working on tape. The tooling today is much more advanced, but is it any better? Are you working faster because of technology, or is it still a grind?

J.R.: I used to co-own a studio and I had a Solid State Logic console, 64 inputs, and a huge Pro Tools rig, but it was more of a tape machine. It was essentially mixing analog. And I to this day would say that I'm faster on an analog console than I am on a computer, simply because I don't have a big control surface. I went from the absolute extreme one way to the absolute extreme other way. Now I have a mouse, one fader, a little PreSonus FaderPort, and a little SSL controller that I hardly ever touch. I've just gotten used to manipulating EQs and things with a mouse. When I had a console, everything is laid out in front of you. You can reach up and grab the EQ of the guitar while you're EQing, or move the fader on the vocal. So it's much more intuitive and a lot faster to be able to do that.

J.R.: I'm doing the exact same thing. In fact, most of the plugins that I use are emulations of the old gear that I used to use. But it's changed drastically, because we used to record onto tape. Everybody was in the same room, you recorded things one at a time, and there were humans everywhere. That's one of the things I miss about the old days of working in a lot of commercial studios. You'd just bump into these incredible people in the hallway, or they'd walk into your studio and you'd be hanging out. I walked into my lounge one day, I was doing some mixing at the Sound Kitchen, and two of the guys from Lynyrd Skynyrd are in there and they're like, "Oh, we're sorry." And I'm like, no, hang out, have some coffee.

Jeff: From a cost perspective it's a lot more economical now, because you don't have to make those massive investments in the technology.

J.R.: I can just tell you, I lost a fortune in the commercial studio business. That console we had was a half a million dollars just for the console. And then you're not talking about the buildout, the tape machines, everything else, all the outboard gear. It was astronomical. The electricity bill alone would make most people faint. And then there's the maintenance. I had a full-time tech guy who would come in and fix things, because switches are going bad and all that. And now, with plugins, it's identical. It's the same stuff.

He resisted mixing in the box for a long time. What changed his mind was a test he ran without telling anyone.

J.R.: I was very much against mixing in the box, as they said back in the day, because that's how I grew up, mixing on big large format consoles in multi-million dollar studios. That was how you made records. But when we shut my studio down, because we were hemorrhaging money, I bought a small Pro Tools rig and set it up in my house. Some people knew the studio had closed, but I was still getting calls to mix things. And I thought, okay, I'm going to do an experiment here. I was mixing a Relient K record.

J.R.: They sent me the files and I said, all right, I'm just going to mix this at home on an Mbox. So I started mixing and sending files, sending MP3s so they could listen, and nobody said anything. Everybody just assumed I was still in my big studio. And I thought, well, if nobody's saying anything and everybody seems to be really happy with the way stuff's going, why take all that extra money and that expense and reinvest it in something where the return on investment is horrible?

Two songs from the catalog

Jeff: Let's listen to a few songs you've engineered and mixed.

"Go Go" by Sparks

Jeff: The first one is called "Go Go." This song came out of a recent sync camp we did in Nashville. Sparks is an artist we work with. Her real name is CJ Oliver, and she was on a previous episode. It's a super fun song, very high energy, a lot going on in it. Talk about that mix. What was your approach?

J.R.: It varies from song to song, because the elements are never the same. Every song is different, every composer has a different take on something, and every snare drum sounds different. I hear about people using presets, and if that works for them, fine, but I don't get it, because I've never had one snare drum that sounded exactly like another one. You're talking about thousands of different things.

J.R.: CJ is just brilliant. She's an amazing producer, songwriter and programmer. So, a ton of elements. It's really a balancing act, trying to find all those things and find a spot where they fit together, where they play nicely and dance together. Again, one of my goals has always been, if you close your eyes, can you hear everything? That song in particular is very busy, very electronic, very dancy and sort of bouncy, and the ultimate goal is just to make it move you. I find that if I'm sitting here mixing and all of a sudden I'm starting to move while I'm working, that's a good sign. A lot of the music I mix isn't necessarily something I would go out to listen to for pleasure. It's my job. My job is to make this sound incredible and to move you. And if I can move me with some music that I'm not really into, that's a good song.

Jeff: How do you collaborate with an artist like CJ? She's pretty technical, she records herself, she produces. I'm sure she has a very specific vision for what she wants.

J.R.: When we first started working together, she didn't know how it was going to be. Anytime you tell somebody, yeah, this guy's mixing your stuff, if they don't know who I am, it's obvious. I'd be the same way. So the very first song that I mixed for her, there were some notes, and they were pretty extensive. I'm looking for this, looking for this, looking for this. And eventually the notes got smaller and smaller and smaller. And now she still sends me notes, it's really cute, it's just like "EQ, pan, etc. You know what to do. Do your thing."

J.R.: Essentially what happens is I'll finish a mix, bring it to where I feel like it needs to be, then send it to the composer, and they'll have a listen, and inevitably there's something I may miss, because they've lived with this stuff intimately and I've been with it a couple of hours. So it might be, hey, can you bring those background vocals down a tad, or maybe up a little bit? Maybe brighten up the kick drum so there's a little bit more snap on it. But the notes are typically pretty minimal.

"Learning to Breathe" by Amelia McLean and Adrian Walther

Jeff: This next one is called "Learning to Breathe." It's Amelia McLean and Adrian Walther, and it's a bit of a different vibe from the last song, with strings in it. I love it when the strings come in at that point. Really pretty song.

J.R.: It's just gorgeous. It's astounding to me the caliber of composers that we have. That was one of the things that really turned me on when I first started working here. I wasn't really sure what to expect. I was coming from a whole different world and jumping into this thing, and I was just blown away. I've worked with some of the greatest musicians on the planet, and walking in and listening to what these guys do, it was just like, wow, this is legit. This isn't some rinky dink thing where they're just making some background noise. These guys are just amazing.

J.R.: They did two versions of that. They did the original one where he had just programmed strings, which were great. But I know he came to you guys and said, hey, I'd really love to put real strings on this. And man, what a difference. Even while I was mixing it, Jared Fox, who's a friend of mine and a great engineer, mixer and producer in his own right, he's the one that recorded the strings. The tracks were just beautiful. It really lifted that song. It was a great song to begin with, but once those real strings got in there and just opened up and filled up that space, it's gorgeous.

Jeff: When you get the tracks for a song like that, what are you trying to do with each element? The vocal is pretty, but it's kind of haunting, and you want to balance it with the instruments so they don't overpower her.

J.R.: To me it's way more art than science. That vocal, just making it feel like it's right here, but also having enough ambience there. EQ, compression, reverb, those sorts of things that are really technical and nerdy, those are my color palette. My goal is to paint a picture with sound. That's why, even when I do my little goofy YouTube thing, I really encourage people to wear headphones so they can actually experience what I'm experiencing. To me that's the payoff, when somebody listens to something and it moves them because of the way it sounds. Then I've done my job.

Jeff: Did you get any notes on that song when you did the mix?

J.R.: No notes. I've been working with Adrian and Matt Wigton and CJ and all of them for a few years now, so they pretty much know what I'm going to do, and I've got a good idea of what they're hoping for. I just finished a song for Adrian about a half hour ago and he had one little minor note. He said, you know that one choir thing at the end, can you turn that? Sure, no problem. But that's it.

You never know which record connects

Jeff: Do you ever get a song where what comes out after the mixing makes you think, wow, this is a lot better than what I thought we had when I started?

J.R.: That's hard to answer, because I've worked on some pretty successful records over the years, and people always say, sit down, and one of the questions is, so did you know that was going to be huge when you were doing it? Did you know that was going to blow up? And honestly, no. You never know. In fact, some of the biggest records I've mixed were kind of an afterthought. One record in particular, I was in Seattle working in a studio, mixing another project, and the record label calls up and says, hey, can you stay an extra few days and knock this thing out for us, we don't have a big budget. And I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. And I was at one point chuckling to myself and to my assistant sitting in the back of the studio. I'm like, who listens to this stuff? I wasn't getting it at all at the time, and that thing just blew up.

J.R.: And then there have been records that I'm working on with an established artist, with the greatest session musicians in the world, legendary people, and you're in this room thinking, this is going to be huge, this is going to make my career. And then it comes out and it's crickets. You just never know. So I try to treat every song, whether it's a song for Soundstripe or Capitol Records or anybody independent, signed, whatever, with the same amount of fervor and intent.

Jeff: About a year ago we had a company meeting, and we'll often bring a musician on to talk about a new song that's been added to the catalog. This meeting there was an artist named Tommy Welton, who had done a song in the catalog called "Born to Roam." He said that when he was working on it he didn't think it was that good. He'd thrown it together, thought it was okay, and handed it over. And when he heard it at the end he said, that's not my song, that can't be the song I gave you guys. It shows the importance of the role you play.

J.R.: Not to sound weird, but I have a lot of power. I can really screw something up if I'm not careful. And obviously I do my best not to do that. That's the thing about Soundstripe, one of the things that I love about us, is that we actually really care. So much so that y'all have hired me to do this. Not that I'm the greatest mixer in the world, but I've got a track record, I've been doing it a long time, and I love what I do. And we care about music. We care about the quality. It's got to be great. There's no sense in doing it if it's not great.

The albums he'd point you to

Jeff: As someone who's been mixing as long as you have, is there one album out there, not by you, that you'd say is the bar? The best mixed album you've heard?

J.R.: I could not narrow that down to one. There are so many records that I love, so many different mixers that I admire and respect. But it's kind of like a perfect storm that happens on one of those records. I was thumbing through Instagram yesterday and I think it was Rick Beato talking about "Rumours," the Fleetwood Mac album, going through the lyric, the guitar parts, isolated tracks, playing each thing and just talking. That record sounds amazing, but it's a perfect storm. You have those people in that moment in that time, going through what they're going through, and that art has created something that is everlasting. It's timeless. It's classic.

Jeff: So you won't give me one. Give me a few, though, because the thing with you is that I'm talking to someone who listens to music differently than most people.

J.R.: That's true, and that's something that's strange about me. I don't listen to a lot of modern music. I listen to it for research purposes when I kind of have to know what's going on. But the goal is never to figure out what they're doing so I can do that. I just need to know. People go, what are you listening to? I'm like, whatever I'm working on. I'm sitting in front of speakers and listening to music all day long. The last thing I want to do when I get in my car is crank up music. My wife and I went on a vacation a couple of years ago, and it was very busy that day, and the only chairs available by the pool were right next to a speaker. And I lay down and the music is going, and I said, honey, I'm so sorry, we've got to find somewhere else. I feel like I'm at work.

Jeff: I'm not letting you off the hook, though. Give me a few albums people should check out if they really want to hear masterful mix engineering.

J.R.: From a rock standpoint, just about anything mixed by Tom Lord-Alge. Tom is brilliant. I've had the honor of mixing songs where he's mixed some and I've mixed some, and I always have to bring my A game. That guy, he's just a monster.

Jeff: Throw out one or two albums.

J.R.: Joshua Judges Ruth, that was a Lyle Lovett record in the 90s that George Massenburg produced, engineered and mixed. That record to me is just sonically perfect for what it needs to be. That's not to say the guitars are huge or whatever, but it's just a very natural sounding album.

J.R.: Going way back, one of the records, the first record actually, that turned me on to mixing, or to sound listening, was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was the first time I'd put headphones on, I'd be laying in my bed and I'd hear things over here and I'd hear them move over to here, and it was like, how did that happen?

J.R.: And Fleetwood Mac, Rumours. A brilliant sounding record and just an amazing album, and one of the greatest selling albums of all time.

Jeff: Something about this conversation is making me a little bit sad for you, because music brings so many people so much enjoyment.

J.R.: Don't take it that way, because obviously I love what I do. We bought this house and it's got a two-car garage and a connected single-car garage, and my intent was to build that out and turn it into a little mix room. So temporarily I set up in a spare bedroom upstairs, and I lovingly refer to this little space as the pit of despair, because I love the Princess Bride. It's just funny to me that some space that brings me so much joy, I call it the pit of despair, just to be silly. I love music. Look behind me. It's a constant in my life. It's the only thing that's been constant aside from my wife.

J.R.: But to your point, yes, I find that I analyze everything. It's hard to go to concerts sometimes because I want to kill the sound guy. I want to choke him and say, turn the snare drum up, or turn the vocal up, I can't hear the guy.

Jeff: For people who are just listening to the audio and can't see: J.R. is sitting in the pit of despair, his home office studio, and behind him I count at least six guitars.

J.R.: I've got a couple. I've got my Thunder jazz bass.

The Grammy that arrived in the mail

Jeff: You won a Grammy award. Tell us what you won it for and a little bit about that experience.

J.R.: Let me go back even before that. In 1998 I worked on an album with an artist named Owsley. He was signed to Warner Brothers, and I had engineered a lot of the album and mixed half of it, and Tom Lord-Alge mixed the other half. And we got nominated for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, which means every other album that's not classical, which was huge. For me, that's a recognition of what I do. That wasn't for the album art, it wasn't for the songwriting. That was for audio engineering. So we got nominated, which was mind-blowing. They sent me the nomination medallion and certificate and the invitation. My wife and I got to go to the Grammys, got to walk down the red carpet. It was insane. We didn't win. Diana Krall's record won that year, which was fine, it's cool.

Owsley's self-titled album came out in 1999 on Giant, a Warner Bros. label, and was nominated at the 2000 Grammys. The record that beat it was Diana Krall's When I Look in Your Eyes.

J.R.: But the next year, this particular one was a Petra record that John and Dino, the guys I was talking about earlier, had produced. And up to that point, if you were an engineer you always kind of got hosed with the Grammys, because if an album won they'd send you a little certificate saying, hey, congratulations, you worked on a Grammy winning album. That's awesome. But they never sent you an award, a statue. And that particular year, I didn't even watch the Grammys. John calls me on the phone and says, hey man, good news, we won another award. And I was like, ah, joking, yay, where are you going to put your certificate?

J.R.: About a week later I was at the studio working and my wife calls me and says, hey, you got a letter from the Grammy people, you want me to read it? And it said, congratulations on your recent Grammy win, this year we've changed the rules, so if you worked on 50 percent or more of an album, you get a Grammy. Yours is being engraved and will be arriving in three to six weeks. And I was like, what?

The album was Petra's Double Take, which won Best Rock Gospel Album at the 2001 Grammys. By his own count, J.R. has worked on seven nominated albums and three winning ones. He has one statue and two certificates.

Jeff: They give you a certificate. Do they give you an option to buy the trophy?

J.R.: It's really weird, because I probably could, but I don't care enough. It's like gold and platinum records. Back in the day, if you mixed a record and it sold 500,000 you got a gold record, and if it was platinum it was a million, and the record company would make you a plaque and send it to you as a thank you, because you helped make them so much money. But it got to the point, especially during that whole weird transition from CD sales to streaming, where they weren't making as much money. So even though I've got probably four or five different gold and platinum albums that I could get, I'd have to pay for them. And I'm just not vain enough. I just don't care. The ones that are hanging up right now, before we moved they were sitting in a box in my wife's closet. And she was like, honey, look, you either need to hang these in your office or get rid of them, but they're leaving my closet, they're taking up space. So I hung them back up. But it's weird, because I'm the only one that's ever in here.

One Man Band

Jeff: I want to talk about your One Man Band project. Tell us a little bit about why you do it. When I look at these videos, it's not a low lift. They're very well done.

J.R.: The video part sucks. They're not good videos. It's all about the music. The video for me is a way to present the audio. I'm not a video guy, I never have been, nor do I ever want to be. I dabbled enough to be able to put something like that together, but it's about the songs.

J.R.: The story goes, I was in my old studio back in probably 2010, and everything was sort of transitioning to computers. I was still mixing on a big analog console, but with the advent of Pro Tools and Beat Detective and Autotune and Melodyne and all these different ways you can manipulate audio to make it perfect, it started sucking the life out of music. Everything started sounding the same to me. Everything felt the same. You couldn't differentiate between drummers, because all of them had been aligned to a grid. And I found myself working one day just being frustrated, like, I want to hear something real.

J.R.: I'd kind of stopped playing for a long time, but I had some guitars laying around, and I thought, maybe I should record a cover song just by myself, just to see if I could do it. My assistant at the time had a drum kit and I said, hey Adam, can I borrow your drums for a couple of days? And I found this sort of obscure early 80s hit, kind of a one hit wonder, this song called "Salt in My Tears." I always loved the guitar riff when I was a kid. I remember when MTV first started, this was one of the first videos they played. And I thought that'd be kind of a fun song to do. I'm just going to see if I can do it.

J.R.: The concept was, I wanted to be able to show people what multi-track recording was. Everything that you see, you're hearing. So if you see the drums and the bass and two guitars playing, that's what you're hearing. When the background vocals come in, they come in, and they disappear. But I had such a good time, and it was so liberating just not caring, thinking, if this is good or if it's not, I'm just going to do it. And then I thought, well, why not do some more?

Jeff: How many videos are on there now?

J.R.: Probably 30, maybe. I do a couple a year. I also started doing a couple with some friends. I have some incredibly talented friends, Adrian Walther being one. We did a Beatles cover. And my dear friend John Spittle, who's been playing drums for country legend Trace Adkins for years, he's my buddy and he gets mad at me any time I don't call him to play on something. It's like, dude, call me up, I'm playing on that. I'm working on one right now with my son. We're doing a cover of "Reptilia" by the Strokes, and our version is much bigger. That Strokes record is obviously intentionally really small and indie and weird sounding. Ours is not. But again, we don't care. For me it's about musical release. I've toured a little bit and played in bands and done all that stuff, but ultimately I love being in the studio environment creating music.

Jeff: The one you did with Adrian was spectacular.

J.R.: Thank you. The YouTube thing for me isn't something I've ever really chased. If you want views, you need to be doing something current, or you need to be doing a twist on something that was really popular. The majority of the songs I've done have been classic rock songs that I love. There's a song called "She's Leaving Home" on Sgt. Pepper's, and the original version is a harp and a string quartet, and then Paul McCartney and John Lennon are singing the vocals. And I decided I was going to do that song, which is as obscure as anything. You're not going to get any clicks or views for that, and of course I had probably a couple hundred. But the point was, I was going to do something different and just use acoustic guitars. And then as I got into it I added drums, more guitars, more keyboards and layers, and it got really big. I'm really pleased with the way that one turned out.

Advice for 18-year-old J.R.

Jeff: If you can go back and give 18-year-old J.R. McNeely one piece of advice, what would it be?

J.R.: Get more sleep. I still need to do that. But just not to stress and not to worry. Things are going to be all right. I've worked in an industry that has been the biggest roller coaster ride you can imagine. All of a sudden there's nothing, and then fame and fortune, and then the pitfalls, and the industry crashing, and the studio industry crashing, and then ending up landing with Soundstripe, which is something I never in a million years would have thought that I would have done. But I love it. I absolutely love it.

J.R.: One of the things I love about working for Soundstripe is the variety of music. It's never the same. The first three songs that I mixed when I was here, one was a very Asian themed thing that Adrian did, with koto and that kind of thing. And Wigton had turned in a song and it was like 8-bit Mario, Game Boy sounding. And it was just crazy. I was like, this is awesome. It's all over the map. It's everything, and I love that.

Jeff: We love having you. It says a lot that everything that goes into our catalog, we don't just take stuff and throw it in. We take the music and put it through a pretty rigorous mixing, engineering and quality control process, so when it goes in the catalog we know it's up to a certain level. Most catalogs don't have that. How many songs have you mixed for us at this point?

J.R.: Thousands. I honestly don't know, but I know it's in the thousands.

Frequently asked questions

Who is J.R. McNeely?

J.R. McNeely is a Grammy-winning mix engineer based in Nashville and the senior mix engineer at Soundstripe. He has worked on more than 300 albums over nearly three decades, including records for Underoath, Relient K, TobyMac and DC Talk, and he was the first chief engineer at the Sound Kitchen in 1994. He also posts multi-instrumental covers on YouTube under the name One Man Band.

What Grammy did J.R. McNeely win?

He won Best Rock Gospel Album at the 2001 Grammy Awards for Petra's Double Take, produced by John and Dino Elefante. He received the statue because the Recording Academy had just changed its rules to give an award to engineers who worked on 50 percent or more of a winning album. In 2000 he was also nominated for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for Owsley's self-titled record, which he says is the recognition that means the most to him because it was specifically for engineering.

How does J.R. McNeely start a mix?

He listens to the client's rough reference mix one time, mutes it, and starts with drums and percussion, which he calls the concrete you place everything else on. Bass comes next, then keyboards, guitars and everything else, with vocals typically last. He does not use presets, because in his words he has never had one snare drum that sounded exactly like another one.

Does J.R. McNeely mix on an analog console or in Pro Tools?

In Pro Tools, but he says he is still faster on an analog console because everything is laid out in front of you. He used to co-own a studio built around a 64-input Solid State Logic console. He now works with a mouse, a PreSonus FaderPort and an SSL controller he rarely touches, and most of his plugins are emulations of the analog gear he used to own.

How does J.R. McNeely know when a song is finished?

By his own answer, when he gives up. He will chase small details no one else will ever hear, then reaches a point where he sits back and it feels ready. His view is that a mix is never truly finished because it is art, so it is done when it is done.

What is One Man Band?

One Man Band is J.R. McNeely's YouTube project, started around 2010, where he records covers playing every instrument and singing every part himself. The videos are laid out in a grid so you can see each part as you hear it, which was his way of showing people how multi-track recording works. There are around 30 of them, mostly classic rock songs, including collaborations with Soundstripe composer Adrian Walther and drummer John Spittle.

Does Soundstripe music get professionally mixed?

Yes. Every track that goes into the Soundstripe catalog runs through a mixing and quality control process, which is what J.R. McNeely does as senior mix engineer. Most libraries do not have that step, and it is the reason a track from the catalog is finished to the same standard as a commercial release. It applies across the library, from film cues to podcast intro music.