Mix engineer Ryan Hewitt goes back a long way with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In fact, he won a Grammy for his work on Stadium Arcadium, the band’s ninth studio album, which was released in 2006 and produced by Rick Rubin.
Hewitt and Rubin must have clicked - they’ve worked together plenty of times since, including on the Chili Peppers’ two most recent albums, 2022’s Return of the Dream Canteen and Unlimited Love - but in an interview with PMC Speakers, Hewitt remembers that, during the making of Stadium Arcadium, the great bearded sage gave him some unorthodox feedback on what he’d done with lead singer Anthony Kiedis’s vocals.
“I send this mix to Rick Rubin and he says, ‘Anthony sounds old. Make him sound younger.’ And I'm like, ‘Oh, I wish there was a knob for that.’”
There isn’t, of course, so Hewitt was forced to try ponder on what exactly he was being asked to do. For reference, Kiedis would have been in his mid-50s at this point.
“And I just figure out like, ‘OK, well, what does that mean? OK, listen to other songs. OK, well, he sounds younger here. What? Oh, well, there's just too much low-mid in the voice.”
Having worked this out, Hewitt set about his task. “It just needed more presence and less chest and more, you know, whatever… more vocal cord sound.”
Happy with what he’d achieved, Hewitt sent his new mix off to Rubin so he could hear what he’d done.
“He's like, ‘You took off five years. See if you can take off another five." And I was like, ‘Wow, OK…’ But I interpreted it right. And it's like, OK, well now what do I do to increase that feeling of youth in a mix? You know, no one's ever said like, you know, turn down the age knob, you know what I mean? And so you get this challenge to try to come up with a solution to something.”
Great producer that Rubin is, Hewitt was always going to have time for what he was saying and try and make him happy, but he says the lesson to learn is that, even if the person you’re working for isn’t held in such high creative esteem, you still need to show them the same level of respect.
“It doesn't make it less important,” he argues. “You know, if someone's hired you to mix something for them and they say, ‘Make me sound younger,’ the quote unquote ‘correct’ way to receive that is like, ‘Challenge accepted. OK, I'll make you sound younger. I don't know how I'm going to do that, but I've got a bunch of stuff over here that has knobs and things on it, and I'll figure it out.’ It's just as exciting as trying to figure out how to get a great guitar sound, you know, or any other given task in what we do.”
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