Inside Track: Jorja Smith 'Try Me'

Riccardo Damian at Mark Ronson’s studio, where he was resident engineer for several years.

Ricky Damian is that rarest of things: a young engineer trained in all‑analogue recording. His experience stood him in good stead with Jorja Smith.

In the Spring of 2014, a famous producer rang the SAE Institute in London, looking for a young engineer willing to adapt to and be trained in his working methods. The catch was that it had to be someone well versed in using analogue gear, including tape.

The only person at SAE who met these criteria was 21‑year old Ricky Damian. Within days of starting work, he found himself conducting recording sessions for what was to become one of the biggest hits of the century: Mark Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk’.

“I was the only person who had the required experience, because they don’t teach tape,” Damian recalls. “Also, the position was for an in‑house engineer, not an assistant or runner, so I needed to be able to hit the ground running. I went to Mark Ronson’s studio, which was in Tileyard in North London at the time, and it was beautiful, with an MCI board, Studer and Scully tape machines, Fairchilds and Pultecs, all the goodies.

“It was crazy. After a week I was recording with Mark and Jeff Bhasker, who is another amazing producer. It was really cool because we were tracking guitars to tape and using the Prince trick of bouncing the song to a Studer A800, then varispeed it down one whole tone, and overdub to that, so when you bring it back to speed you’ve pitched your new recording up a tone, including the formant, and the guitar sounds thinner, funkier and more in the pocket.”

Globetrotting

Ricky Damian mixed and engineered Jorja Smith's 2023 album Falling Or Flying.

Damian’s time with Ronson took him to many places around the planet, including the US, where he helped the producer build studios in LA and in New York. He worked with Ronson on two solo albums, Uptown Special (2015) and Late Night Feelings (2019), and the Yebba album Dawn (2021), which was nominated for a Best Engineered Album Grammy Award. Covid then sent his career in a new direction.

“During the pandemic I stayed at home in the UK, and started mixing a lot, which I always wanted to do. It was great because I’m a bit OCD, and I feel like I need to discover new things every day. I find a lot of pleasure in experimenting. I might study the work of a specific mix engineer for a week and see what I can borrow or steal from them. So I spent a lot of 2020 mixing and experimenting. As the world opened up again, I went back to my regular clients, like Jorja Smith, Sampha and Ezra Collective.

“Last Summer I was asked to engineer a Paul Simonon record, with producer Tony Visconti, at Damon Albarn’s Studio 13. I had done a few things there, but the session was a bit of a disaster on the first day, because the studio wasn’t being used much, and as a result the equipment had been a bit neglected. I managed to get it to work again, and after that I worked with the studio manager to turn the place into a great commercial facility with a unique vision, where thanks to the legacy of Damon Albarn, everything is present to make a great record. It has an incredible instrument and gear collection, and for the last year we’ve been refurbishing it, fixing it, improving it. It was a nice journey, because I now do all my recording and production work there, as much as I can, including for the Jorja Smith record.”

Damian has worked with Jorja since the beginning of her career, engineering and occasionally co‑producing, and he mixed the whole of her recent album Falling Or Flying, the focus of this article.

Home Comforts

Although Studio 13 is now Damian’s go‑to recording place, his home studio remains his preferred mixing spot. “I call it OCD Studios. My flat in North London is actually very quiet, and the acoustics are very controlled. A friend of mine, Chris Walls of Level Acoustic Design, who did all of Tileyard, designed the acoustic treatment for the room. It’s a very comfortable place to mix. I have ATC SCM25A monitors, which I love and have had for a long time. I also have some Auratones and Neumann KH120s, and some radio speakers.

“I use a full‑spec M2 MacBook Pro, which is incredible. I actually mixed the Jorja Smith record while I was changing laptop. I started on the i9 with the touchbar, and the fans would start going just when writing an email. It’s terrible. The M2 laptop is night and day, the fans don’t even start! My interface is an Antelope Goliath HD, which is unbelievable. It’s got 16 mic pres, 16 line inputs, and DI inputs, and re‑amp outputs, so it’s the perfect all‑in‑one interface.

Falling Or Flying was mixed in Ricky Damian’s home OCD Studio.

“Although I have quite a bit of gear here, I mix mostly in the box because I don’t like to tie the mix to the room. I travel a lot, and need to be able to open up my sessions anywhere without any problems. And on Jorja Smith’s record, I mixed 15 songs across five weeks, and I was constantly jumping between sessions. There’s no way that I can always recall outboard. When I’m recording and mixing a project, I’ll record it with as much out‑of‑the‑box processing as possible, and then I mix in the box.

“I do also record at OCD sometimes. I have 50 microphones, and some outboard. I have a Tubetech CL‑1B, Neve 1084s and early BAE Audio Neve 1073s, an Eventide H3000, a Chandler Tube Driver, and a pair of Siemens 295 EQs, which are like the Soundtoys Sie‑Q and really beautiful EQs. I also have tons of pedals, by Strymon and others, that I run stuff through sometimes. But I always print it. I never use live outboard in the mix. I also have keyboards like the Sequential Circuits Prophet‑5, Yamaha DX7, a Minimoog Model D, a Roland Juno‑6 and Juno‑106.”

Going Back

Jorja Smith’s previous record, an EP called Be Right Back (2021), had been mostly recorded by Damian, who also co‑produced two of the album’s eight tracks. The entire record was mixed by American star mixer Manny Marroquin, which was a learning experience for Damian. “As a recording engineer and producer I try to get everything to sound as close as possible to a releasable record, because why not make the life of who’s coming next as easy as possible? If you deliver something to a mixer without identity or without knowing really what you want, what comes back from the mixer could be anything. Manny’s mixes were beautiful, but not far from my rough mixes. He clearly knew exactly what not to touch and what to touch, and thereby elevated the songs. I realised that knowing what do and what not do is a great skill to learn.

“After that it was pretty clear to Jorja and I that we would be able to create what we needed by ourselves. I started mixing a lot of her live stuff. There was a Glastonbury concert and a few live streams of performances that I mixed, and she was always really happy about the results. Obviously everything is important to her, but she is very particular about her vocals. As the person who records her vocals and who works on getting her vocal sounds, it was a natural thing for her to ask me to mix her record.

Ricky Damian (right) with members of his own band Bob & the Apple at Studio 13, where Falling Or Flying was tracked.

“We started recording the album in October last year. We booked Studio 13 for a month and a half, and had multiple rooms going at the same time. I was tracking musicians and stuff downstairs while the producers were working on beats and programming upstairs. It was pretty hectic but also very inspiring. Jorja and I have a process when we track the vocals. I use a beautiful Flea 47 or an AKG C12 to record her. That goes into my Neve 1084 [preamp], and then into my Tube‑Tech CL‑1B [compressor] and, on this record, straight to Pro Tools. There were so many moving parts that tape would have been too complicated. Also, the producers were in Logic and Ableton so we were flying in between systems, and had to keep things as streamlined as possible.”

Bringing It Together

Towards the end of the project, Damian retreated to OCD for the final mixes. “There were several challenges in mixing this record. They were still working on it while I was mixing it, so there was a lot of back and forth. Sometimes they would do tweaks on songs that I had already mixed, and I had to revisit some of the mixes. It turned into five weeks non‑stop mixing to be able to deliver for a specific deadline, because with vinyl and everything you need to book your slot at the pressing plant early. It was incredibly intense.

Riccardo Damian: Getting all vocals to sound cohesive was another big challenge, because there were vocals from the demo recordings, recorded by the producers with a Shure SM7 in the room with speakers on... and the recordings I had done with a polished U47 in a silenced room.

“Another major challenge was that the 15 songs were a big body of work, that’s very varied, with many different genres, very different vocal performances, very different vocal recordings, and very different sounds, that I had to make sound cohesive. It’s also somewhat of a conceptual album, with a thread that we wanted to maintain, especially from a vocal perspective. Getting all vocals to sound cohesive was another big challenge, because there were vocals from the demo recordings, recorded by the producers with a Shure SM7 in the room with speakers on, and tracked in several other recording situations, and the recordings I had done with a polished U47 in a silenced room.

“While I was mixing she sometimes changed lyrics, and re‑recorded some of her vocal parts, and I’d be sent stems that would sound slightly different again. There were a multitude of different recording situations to deal with. The producers did a great job to try and aggregate everything, but in the end it was up to me to get everything to work together during the final mixes.”

Trying Times

Damian uses the album’s opener, ‘Try Me’, to illustrate his mix approach on Falling Or Flying. His Pro Tools mix session is huge, with a whopping 147 audio tracks, and as you’d expect from someone who calls his studio OCD, the session is extremely well‑organised, with many related tracks grouped in Folder tracks.

“I try to set my gain staging early on. I’ll play the session and look at the levels on these two master tracks. If necessary, I take all audio clips down until I have a healthy level on my mix bus, it’s not clipping, and I have headroom that allows me to apply the right treatments. In this session I trimmed all clips down by 5dB, for example. It’s the first thing I do, before adding plug‑ins, because when you change Clip Gain later on, you affect the compression. My gain‑staging awareness obviously comes from working with analogue gear.

“My mix bus prints on my print tracks below it. I have another master fader called ‘Listen=M=’, with a FabFilter Pro‑L 2 limiter, meters, and tons of very useful measuring tools. I save my mixes as 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc, and whenever one of my mixes gets sent out, they are called Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3, Ref 1 update 1, stuff like that. The version that was kept here is my mix 11. I keep my entire history of my mixes so I can at any time go back.”

A typical section of the (huge) Pro Tools session for ‘Try Me’. Note the way the lead vocal in the centre is split out to several tracks. The green aux inputs are lead vocal busses, while the folder track at the bottom contains numerous effected vocal tracks.

Download the ZIP file of various Pro Tools mix session screens for a detailed view.

jorja_smith_try-me_edit-window-screens.zip

Vocals

“The good thing about this mix was that I knew exactly what the vision was, because I had been working on the song in the studio as well. As I mentioned, the main challenge with this song was getting the lead vocals to sound right, because they were recorded in various different ways, mainly the SM7 demo vocals and some Neumann U47 comps. There were wild differences between takes, even between different words from different microphones, so it was really challenging. It’s why the vocal sections look a bit messy, with many layers of vocal tracks. It took me a long time to make the vocal sound coherent. The rest of the mix was a matter of trying to fit the vocals in with all the different elements that are in the song.

“I tend to organise vocals by section. I’ll have all the vocals for the first verse together, and then the chorus, and then the second verse, and so on. So looking at the first verse, there are two red audio tracks, and four tracks to which I’ve copied tiny bits of audio to which I added effects, like delay throws, and another audio track in red. They all go to the default green aux bus called ‘@LV Bus 3’ for overall processing.

“There’s a lot of fixing going on. There’s a wet vocal track, ‘TryMe_DV1_L’, and two dry audio tracks. I always ask for the vocals to be sent exactly as they have them, ie. wet, and a version that is just completely raw. In this case I’m layering the completely raw version and their processed version to make everything sound cohesive. This is something I would normally never do. It just so happened that this verse was very problematic with the different U47 and SM7 recordings, so layering them gave a sense of fullness and coherency. Of course I made sure they were phase‑aligned.”

Making Space

“With regards to the plug‑ins, I added the Oeksound Soothe 2 to the original wet audio, as well as to the dry track. The latter also has the Baby Audio TAIP AI‑Powered Tape Saturator, because I’m trying to give it character at the same time. Sometimes saturation really helps to smooth out any nasty frequencies and resonances. I also have three instances of the UAD Oxford SuprEsser to take out specific frequencies.

“Then there’s a Soundtoys Radiator adding the Altec tube sound for some character, because when you surgically remove stuff you lose coherency and body. I get it back with a little saturation. There’s also a FabFilter Pro‑Q 3 EQ and a FabFilter Pro‑DS. Other than the UAD LA‑2A on the Verse 1 bus there’s not a lot of compressing going on here, because the vocals were already compressed at source. On the blue tracks below, the snippets of audio I dragged down are treated with the Native Instruments Raum, Eventide H910 Harmonizer, Soundtoys EchoBoy, and the fourth one with the Arturia Dist Coldfire and Avid Space reverb.

“I’m all about using effects to create space. I’m moving things around, and basically making things sound 3D in a way that’s not distracting. When listening to this verse, it feels like the vocals are moving a little bit on these words I pulled down, to emphasise a specific word or delivery. The 910 effect is a very subtle delay which helps create a wash. We had a real 910 with Mark Ronson, and I fell in love with it. I also always EQ my effects, because often you don’t always need a full‑band effect. The EchoBoy is set to a stereo ping‑pong, which I EQ’ed as well. The track with the Dist Coldfire was a crazy one. I needed a distorted layer so this is the chain: distortion from the ColdFire, heavy flanging from the EchoBoy, and the Space mimics a car radio.

“There’s an additional Distortion aux on this verse, again using the Dist Coldfire. I used a lot of parallel distortion in this song, and this is one example, with the Dist Coldfire going into a [XLN Audio] Retro Colour RC20 and a Pro‑Q 3. I’m sending bits of different sections to this, depending on what was needed. Finally, I have sends on the main Folder track, which include delays, reverbs, [Soundtoys] MicroShift, and so on. Verse two below has its own tracks, its own bus, and its own processing. In this song, verse two is a whole different situation compared to verse one, with for example a Bricasti room emulation from Liquidsonics Seventh Heaven. The end of the song again has a whole different sound, without other delays, reverbs, or processing.

“I like to tailor effects specifically to sections, so the reason I spread the vocals out over so many different tracks is because not one section tends to sound the same. There’s not as much processing in the choruses, because I used another approach, which is not to process much on the actual audio tracks, but only do corrective processing on them. There are many instances of the Oxford SuprEssor on the audio tracks, for example. The hooks are a combination of different layers, and I’m doing more stuff collectively on the bus, ‘@LV BUSS 1’. There’s an LA‑2A, Pro‑Q 3, Soothe 2, Radiator, and many sends to several reverbs and delays. This was a messy mix! It’s worth mentioning that there’s also some printed effects from the production that are running parallel and that I treated similarly.”

On The Bus

The detail that went into treating just the first verse on ‘Try Me’ is impressive, and an equally detailed look at Damian’s treatments of all other aspects of a mix session that’s around 200 tracks large would run into dozens of magazine pages. To keep things manageable, he dives straight into his mix bus treatments.

“What I put on the mix bus evolves all the time, but this is pretty representative. The premix bus, ‘=M=MIXBUSS’ has a cut under 100Hz from the FabFilter Pro‑MB, controlling the sub and the fundamentals. At some point in the mix I felt the bass was a little too heavy so I used the multiband to control it. I also added a little UAD Ampex ATR‑102 tape effect. I used actual tape machines a lot, of course, but this plug‑in works really well. I also want to mention that I use a lot of EQ side‑chaining in the session to make space.

“My actual mix bus normally starts with a mastering EQ, which is the Dangerous Bax. I only use it to filter the top and the bottom, just to avoid anything getting into my compression I don’t want. Then I have my UAD SSL G Bus compressor, using the side‑chain filter at 80Hz, so the low end doesn’t trigger compression too heavily. It’s followed by a UAD Manley Variable Mu [compressor]. I like to use these two together because I get the peak control from one and the body control from the other.

“After that, I have a UAD Chandler Curve Bender EQ, doing minimal things. It’s more some overall shaping, kicking up 70Hz, taking 300Hz down, boosting a little bit of 20kHz. It’s general broad strokes. I tend to do these things at the beginning of the mix and then review them later. Then there’s a Brainworx bx_digital V3 surgical EQ, which I touch a lot later in the mix. I use it for Mid‑Sides EQ, and there are many notches and boosts in the midrange. I also mono’ed the bass in this song at 85Hz, and added 115 percent stereo spread to the rest.

“After that, I have the iZotope Ozone 9, with a little bit of EQ, I probably felt at some point that the mix was maybe too dark, and some Exciter. There’s another Soothe, which glues it all together. Nothing on my mix bus is working hard. I learned that if anything is working hard on your mix bus, you’re doing something wrong and the mix ends up sounding very tiny. So things are working really gently.

“Finally, there are a couple of limiters, the [Sonnox] Oxford Inflator and the DMG Audio Limitless. Again, they’re not doing much, but the Inflator gives it that little rounding which I really like. It’s a magical tool. The mix is not squashed, there’s still very much room for mastering. I try to get my mixes as loud as possible without starting to sound compromised.”