- PHILIP JAMIESON
- MATT BAYLES: Seven years ago, he left Minus the Bear to focus on making records.
Matt Bayles is a Seattle-based producer/engineer/mixer (and founding member of the band Minus the Bear) who owns and runs the beloved Red Room recording studio. Bayles’s production renders songs raw, yet contained. His low-end heft is an accurate beast. Atmospherics shimmer and bend with a convex glint—when a song needs to punch, it hits with pronounced girth. Mastodon’s Bayles-produced Remission album will straight up make you claw a tree and mark territory. Other Bayles clients include the Blood Brothers, ISIS, the Murder City Devils, Helms Alee, Absolute Monarchs, Eighteen Individual Eyes, Rocky Votolato, Botch, Pearl Jam, and more. Recently, he’s been working with Sandrider and Dust Moth on new material. Seven years ago, Bayles left Minus the Bear to focus solely on making records, and people have been marking trees because of him since. Bayles spoke, pronouncing everything perfectly.
When you think of mixing and producing, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
At its most basic, mixing is the balancing of frequencies, levels, and panning to get things to even out. After you get the tech stuff out of the way, you have to concentrate on what’s meant to be the musical hook at any given time—a guitar nuance, a vocal inflection, a drum fill—and make it pop. Production is the choices you make to create those moments during recording. Getting the vocal take, the vocal sound, arranging the song so that there are those little things to listen for on the second listen, or a year later, or five years later.
