Getcha Some Productions Podcast Episode 34
https://reverb.grsm.io/GetchaSome
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_nc0nleQ5Yk_eKuNpkDFvQ
A podcast covering all things related to music production: from the first note to the last fan and everything in between. Our mission is to create music and to inspire others to do the same.
Not your typical podcast, each episode is a live business meeting. We are in the process of building a media empire (a music production company) and listeners/viewers come along for the ride. This is a chronicle and archive of our progress.
This podcast is always candid and unrehearsed.
In this episode we discuss:
Special guest is Tim Mirth.
http://www.timmirth.com/index.html
https://m.facebook.com/woodairmetal/
https://youtube.com/channel/UCw-wxJ9TZ2GDR9FoHY_BRHA
New Album: l.php
Tim starts off by saying that he just turned 40 this year in 2021 and he’s been playing guitar since he was 10 years old. Tim lived in West Virginia when he was younger and lived in a very competitive household. He remembers being exposed to music in church as a young child. He moved to Pennsylvania when he was 10 years old. He remembers that he used to sneak up into his attic and play his dad’s 1968(?) Gretsch Corvette. Which he still has to this day. He shows it on the video. He knew enough basic music from taking piano lessons as a child to figure out some basic melodies on the guitar. He was able to figure out the basic mechanics of guitar which is that you have to press the string against the fret to create the pitch you want and then pluck the strings.
Interestingly, he mentions that he didn’t have any friends because he had just moved. So the discovery of the guitar and the concurrent lack of social interaction afforded him the opportunity to mess around on the guitar a lot more.
Tim was afraid that his dad would tell him not to play the guitar but that wasn’t the case at all. His dad was supportive of him playing by giving him a book and showing him how to tune the guitar. But his dad also recognized Tim’s personality in that you couldn’t tell him what to do or else he might rebel against that. So, his dad was wise to just show him the way a little bit but then leave him alone to forge his own path. Tim was an independent child from the beginning.
Funnily enough, Tim actually thought he was going to be a rapper when he was a kid. He wasn’t really interested in guitar music. It was just that the guitar was right there in front of him and he had an interest in music generally. He talks about Ice-T and Kool Moe Dee. He references turning 10 in 1991 and Nirvana coming out that year. Within a year or two from that point he was starting bands and he’s been in bands consistently since then.
By the time Tim turned 16 all he listened to was rock and metal. Megadeth Rust in Peace came out and Metallica the black album had come out. He also mentioned Pantera.
It’s so funny, he tells a story that his dad got tickets to a Spyro Gyra concert. This was not Music that Tim was particularly interested in. But, he decided to go anyway. His dad was really interested in smooth jazz and Tim was trying to be nice because his aunt was going. Even though he wasn’t really interested in that type of music at the time, he was really inspired and moved by the level of performance and musicianship and how much fun they were having on stage. Somehow, he made a connection and convinced his parents to let him take jazz guitar lessons at the time. He took lessons from a great jazz guitar player named Frank Singer in Erie, Pennsylvania. Those were the first lessons he ever took. Tim mentions that it was fortunate that he found this teacher and it was also great timing for him in his musical journey.
Tim went to Music college for one year when he was 19 years old. He was very ambitious so he put on a big concert with all original music. It’s strange and he concedes that it’s a little bit egotistical to even say but he felt like he peaked at 19 with that concert. His plan after that was to transfer to the Berklee College of Music. At the last minute he decided that he didn’t want to go. Just didn’t feel right and he didn’t want to pay for it. So, he decided that he was going to move to New York. He bought a greyhound ticket and told his mom that he was moving to New York. Just like that.
That was in the year 2000 or so. He didn’t really have a plan at all. Just knew that people said they were moving to New York to play music so he was going to do that too.
When he first moved to Brooklyn he lived up in Canarsie. Which he refers to is no man’s land. He found a job working at a music store called Royal Music in Canarsie. They had another store in Long Island apparently. Royal Music was the one of the few Platinum Gibson dealers. That was kind of cool because Tim would get to see some really nice Gibsons that locals would order that Gibson would ship to the store for local pickup. They were also a big Ernie Ball dealer and he got to go to the Tonight Show and hang in the green room with Albert Lee.
Interesting thing that he says is that he was studying jazz but he wasn’t gutsy enough to play at the time. I can definitely sympathize with that.
In New York he studied mostly with a guy named Steve Adelson. Steve actually plays Chapman stick. Steve used to play with Les Paul. Tim characterizes himself a stubborn and this is the second time during the show he mentions it. That was the time when he says he would practice for 10 hours a day. He would work all day, come home and eat Ramen noodles and then practice from 7 PM till 3 AM. It was a great time for his technique. Of course, he says that if he had to go back and do it again he would practice different things. But, he also acknowledges that you have to do that to get good. You also have to spend a long amount of time (possibly) practicing the wrong things in a way. He goes on to say that it’s really hard to do that in college because you have a full course load so you actually don’t have that much time to practice. In college you don’t really get a chance to do the deliberate practice thing.
He says that he thinks he started playing with Paul Stranahan maybe around 2007. That was a fun band that was very challenging for him. It incorporated odd time signatures and things like that. He left for a year and when he got back that band was still going but someone else had taken the guitar slot. However, he was still friendly with the drummer and they were both Meshuggah fans.
Now we start getting into the writing of this record. The new red side visible record. He was studying composition at the time and inventing a 12 tone language that he wanted to use.
Link to the record on multiple streaming platforms:
He even goes on to say that his wedding music which he wrote had 12 tone concepts built into it. Written for violin and piano. Specifically, the bridesmaid walk down the aisle to a 12 tone piece.
The segue is that a lot of the red side visible stuff is 12 tone. The first album from 2010 was called Enter Entropy. There’s a song called WTF. He refers to that particular song as 12 tone porn music. On the new album, there’s a song called Snap Crackle Pop. That song is also 12 tone-based.
I take a break to pay Tim some compliments about the record.
Compliments:
- I like the way you mixed the vocals and the mix between the scream vocals (which are mixed down) and the angelic choir stuff
- Holdsworth style licks on Snap Crackle Pop are very tasty
- Crazy solo on dislocated – synthesque sounds? A bit glitchy. Very cool.
- Dislocated also has the section that sounds like either epic (yet insane) movie soundtrack or video game soundtrack. Very epic section.
- The solo from It’s more complicated than you think really burns. Those licks are fiery.
- He plays tasty solo stuff, but also serves the song
Tim’s favorite album of all time is California by Mr. Bungle. He adores the heck out of that album. He claims that it’s a total masterpiece.
This album was inspired in part by that album because he had the drums done at least seven years ago but the album was sitting stagnant. So he decided to just go all in and give it the Mr. bungle treatment.
The original Red Side Visible band played shows and toured and played live. To characterize the record, it’s inspired by bands like Mr. bungle and frank Zappa. There’s an element in humor in it as well of course.
Dan pays him some compliment and highlights the humor that Tim infused in the record.
Tim agrees and goes on to say that there were many parts of the record where he says that he took the cuffs off. In other words, he didn’t allow himself to be limited in any way. So, if there was a choir part then so be it. If there was gonna be a rapping section so be it. Whatever he felt in the moment he would go with it.
He talks about the choir section which was a section that really jumped out to me. He says that he was just recording a vocal part and he just got lucky with the settings and he liked the sound. So he decided to do 30 more tracks of choir stuff because he was just going with it in the moment.
10 years ago, the band was playing a lot. They even had a tour in Europe. But there wasn’t really a jazz metal scene back then. He says that back then when jazz metal bands started coming out they were more derivative. It was like you took a Periphery record and added a saxophone to it. He feels that what they were trying to do was a little different. They weren’t really trying to do jazz metal specifically. They were just trying to do their own thing in a way.
In fact, he goes on to say and repeat the fact that he actually didn’t write any of the music with the guitar in his hands. He typed it all into Finale. He points out that the music generally sounds pretty awful when it’s being played back in Finale. So, if you can get it to sound pretty good in Finale, when actual real musicians go to play it it’s gonna sound pretty dope.
He talks about how they did a radio show with the original band which is on YouTube somewhere. So here’s the link!
The original band dissolved because some folks moved away and they couldn’t maintain a rehearsal schedule. Every member that you add to a band makes it exponentially harder. So adding one member doesn’t make it just a little bit harder or “one” harder. It’s like a multiplicative affect. The good thing though was that even though the band fell apart the drummer had spent a lot of time learning all the new songs and went and recorded all of them.
For the guitar geeks. Tim says that he tried recording versions of the songs over the years mostly using modeling software and technology. And he’s had all of the great ones that everyone raves about. But, he was really never happy with the sound. He says that they all sounded wimpy. One day, on a whim, he just plugged into his Marshall and put a random mic in front of it. He didn’t even try to position the mic well or select a good mic it was just a random mic. He says that instantly there was a three-dimensional thing that happened to the mix that improved it so much. So, he went and re-recorded all the guitar with real amplifiers mic’d in the room. He has a bunch of amplifiers so there’s never the same amp on a track. Only the drums were recorded in a studio, everything else was recorded in his house.
He mixed it all himself but he had it professionally mastered by a popular mastering studio for metal. However, he really didn’t like the master ultimately. He felt that he was given the studio standard metal treatment and he really didn’t like the way certain frequencies stuck out. Eventually he had to master it himself all over again. The record is really not a metal record purely speaking so it really does beg for a different treatment.
He didn’t really know how to mix and master a metal record. So he actually went out and bought courses on it and did a lot of research on YouTube while he was trying to do it himself. He also read a bunch of books and tried a bunch of different things. Metal is interesting because it’s really not going for a natural sounding thing. To get the full affect you have to actually go for an unnatural sound. He gives the example that for snare drum you have to really ramp up the 7K frequency. Not sure if that’s the exact right one but the point is that even though it seems like a really a unnatural thing to do, certain elements of the music can easily get lost so you really have to enhance them by ramping up frequencies a lot more than you would think.
Tim talks about his upcoming Night Terrors album which should come out in the next few months. That’s more of a free jazz sort of thing.
Tim says that he put thousands of hours into this Red Side Visible record. It absolutely sounds like it took thousands of hours to make. It’s well worth a listen. In fact it’s well worth multiple lessons because there’s just so much in there. I think the more you listen to it the more you’ll get out of it.
Tim reminds us that he made four videos for this record. Links below.
Also followed him on Instagram.
https://instagram.com/timmirth_guitar?utm_medium=copy_link
Each of Tim’s different projects have their own Facebook page.
Tim Mirth – https://www.facebook.com/timmirth
Red side visible – https://www.facebook.com/redsidevisible
Night terrors – https://www.facebook.com/niteterrors/
Stellar regions – https://www.facebook.com/StellarRegionsTrio/
Chroma drive – https://www.facebook.com/chromadrivemusic/
Tim says that he’s going to focus on jazz for the next 10 years.
He’s been studying the crap out of bebop for the last month.
Once again, The album is red side visible a break from normality.
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