Producer Profile: Devin Townsend

EVER WONDERED WHAT IT’S LIKE MIXING A 600-LAYER TRACK? PETER ZALUZNY EXPLORES THE UNREAL PRODUCTION BEHIND DEVIN TOWNSEND’S 25TH ALBUM.

As Devin Townsend was wrapping up recording the latest chapter of his storied career, he quickly realised that in order to complete the album, he would have to mix it himself.

Sure, Townsend had been involved in production, mixing and so on since the days of Strapping Young Lad, but he’d never worked with something on the same scale as his gargantuan, multi-genre masterpiece, Empath.

It was a tough job, but Townsend learned a lot about production, engineering and mixing, alongside psychological and physical challenges that manifested while putting together what is arguably the most complex record he’s ever written.

You’ve been very candid about how writing and recording Empath was a huge emotional journey. What did you learn about mixing during these sessions?

I hate it [ laughs]. I don’t hate mixing but the productions that I tend to do are super dense. I’ve got 600 tracks of shit that’s got a 100 percent success rate. But I think the difference is the stuff I write is idiosyncratic and complex to the point where no one else is going to be able to mix it.

This one was really emotionally difficult because there was a lot of fear and feelings of going crazy with it. I felt [through] a lot of the process to include my suffering through some things that I had consciously swept under the rug since Strapping basically, but I think I came out of this with the awareness that I can handle it.

And how did that feel at the end?

I actually compromised my health a little bit while I was doing it. I had done so much demo work prior to tracking that I gave myself carpel tunnel and later I f***ed up my knee. So I had to stop exercising, to the point where it affected my self-esteem.

I felt gross, and I resented the fact that just the physicality of working on the computer sort of prevented me from keeping up with this exercise regime that was really important to me. But I knew that I had to do this for the sake of my creative process, for the sake of finding out if I was the type of character that would allow these things to take me down.

Though I came out of Empath really depressed, and I hadn’t felt that in a long time, I knew that was going to happen so I knew I just had to ride it out. I knew it would go away.

The thing that really stands out about Empath is the dynamics. It sounds so huge without relying on volume and it retains all the

details. How did you do that?

It’s all micro movements, not only within automation for volume but also automation for EQ. All the stuff that makes my work “my work,” exists in the mid frequencies, so if I smash it into a limiter it just becomes static.

What I basically do is go through a section, eight bars, and loop it. I’ll tear each section back to drums and then I’ll add bass, but then you have a song like “Hear Me” where the drum frequency may clash with the bass. So what we do is we take that frequency and then we’ll duck it in the bass. But then we don’t have enough low-end, so in the sections where the kick drums are going, I’ll duck whatever that is in the bass, then boost it in the guitar.

Then in the next section where it slows down and the kicks go away, we can take that out and go back to the original thing. It’s almost like manual compression in a way, and it’s a f***ing nightmare!

Is that why a rain stick made its way into a cymbal section?

[ Laughs] Yeah! Well the rain stick I haven’t used literally, but I have used samples of a lot of things. What I’ll do is if the effect is supposed to be notes on the crash but all that’s doing is turning into a wash, then I’ll dip the crash and replace it with something manageable because the effect is more important.

Initially you said that the vinyl version was the definitive way to listen to Empath, but now you’re all about the soon-to-be-released 5.1 mix. Why is that your favourite?

Empath was mixed differently for each medium and with the 5.1 version, like, people say that I do the wall of sound thing, but that’s only because that’s what happens with the amount of information I’m pumping out of two speakers. It’s not an intentional thing.

That’s why I like the 5.1 mix, there’s more room. For example, I didn’t need to worry about the echo and the low-end, because I could just put the echo in the back speakers instead. As soon as we bumped the stereo mix down to mp3 it sounded like shit just because of the high frequency that’s helping the snare. So I made a decision to make that version darker sounding, so when it came up on Spotify... well, Spotify always sounds like balls.

So how do you think this is going to impact your work moving forward?

I think my guitar sound is going to change. I’m going to go much cleaner, like metal riffs through a Malcolm Young-type tone. It’s hard to do because it doesn’t have the same impact, but a weird clean-tone metal would open up the frequency range.