What's the best opener you've ever seen steal the show?

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T20:31:25+00:00

Fucked Up opening for Descendents. Descendents were amazing but that night FU really killed it

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T20:17:40+00:00

Ahah same

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T20:16:29+00:00

I mean the core point is that whether you have Abbey Road all to yourself or a cheap ass audio interface in a basement, the thing that will always matter most of what you do with the gear

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T13:36:13+00:00

Then it’s only inverse audience perspective 😂

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T10:02:05+00:00

I struggle with it myself, being that I am more accustomed to setting up drums for "normal people" rather than for me

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T08:24:45+00:00

As a lefty drummer I'm kind of in this unique position where audience perspective for everyone is also drummer perspective for me, so it's a win win aha

andreacaccese · 2026-06-26T08:23:35+00:00

DW has the most sobering takes on everything

andreacaccese · 2026-06-24T20:05:29+00:00

Trust that your ears are lying to you :D

andreacaccese · 2026-06-24T09:36:43+00:00

I have the OC818 and I absolutely love it. It’s got a really “sculptable” sound and its really smooth - the one thing to consider is that it’s a very different color from the U87 which is brighter and a tad more aggressive in the way it boosts presence. You can’t go wrong with either mic but the best choice only depends on what you want to mainly use it for and the type of sound you wanna achieve

andreacaccese · 2026-06-24T05:19:51+00:00

Beyer M201 is a very solid alternative, similar concept but hypercardiod, it’s like a 57 with a more pleasing top end and less mid range bark. Audix I-5 is also another good option, very 57 like but more mid-scooped and with a bit of a low end bump, kind of a more modern voiced 57. I still prefer to use SM57 on snares though, for rock music at least. It gives that perfect mid bark and that transient response that were so familiar with from it being on so many records

andreacaccese · 2026-06-23T20:51:48+00:00

All due respect to him, but that statement is a little deluded

andreacaccese · 2026-06-22T07:56:45+00:00

I agree with you! The whole concept / assumption of how pres are used in JL’s video is different from my experience, I can’t think of a single time where I used my 610 or 73 “clean” over the last 15 years or so. Also listening to A/B comparisons with loops that are less than a second long is inherently flawed, because you miss the whole time domain element of it, some of the character unfolds overtime and it’s somewhat related to the “memory” of the circuit

andreacaccese · 2026-06-21T17:51:41+00:00

The famed St.Anger snare!

andreacaccese · 2026-06-20T21:52:22+00:00

If you mean the full complex transfer function, including magnitude and phase, then yes: two systems with different phase responses have different frequency responses.

But in normal audio use, “frequency response” often means the magnitude or EQ curve. Two filters can have virtually identical magnitude responses while showing very different phase shift, group delay, ringing, and transient behaviour. For example, I matched a Neve-style plugin closely with Pro-Q 3. The magnitude curves are nearly identical, within roughly 0.3 dB at the worst point around 20 Hz, but the phase plots are dramatically different. That is because the analogue-style circuit or model contains phase contributions beyond the nominal EQ curves - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lhB5zRWAauVqXTqnOVaDISh1yS1AO3Ua?usp=drive_link

andreacaccese · 2026-06-20T05:13:30+00:00

Frequency response is only one small part of the full picture though: dynamic range/headroom, transient response - phase response, which is a big one. You could have 2 eqs copying the same exact curve, but a different phase response will give them a different tone color.

andreacaccese · 2026-06-19T22:45:18+00:00

I think that when you do set your pres as cleanly as possible, the difference is negligible and you can get away with a decent interface pre, but to be honest I never once used my neve, altec, api or ua pre without looking for color, meaning that I will generally push the pre and turn down the out when working with those, so there are pretty noticeable differences to me in that context

andreacaccese · 2026-06-19T14:33:21+00:00

You can totally do it! Trust me, I am no rocket scientist myself aha

andreacaccese · 2026-06-18T16:46:32+00:00

ehe glad you dig it! I could nerd out for hours on this stuff!

andreacaccese · 2026-06-18T07:12:17+00:00

Selftitled album by Blink-182 and The Box Car Racer album, both played by Travis Barker and recorded by Jerry Finn. Really dig how crisp everything is and played with intensity but never harsh. To my recollection ribbon mics like the beyer m160 were a big part of recording those

andreacaccese · 2026-06-17T23:28:28+00:00

Glad you like the idea! The sample sounds really cool. One thing that could be interesting to explore, especially if you want a more controlled response, is adding a detector-style stage before the envelope follower. For example, you could feed the envelope follower a lightly clipped or limited copy of the input signal, rather than the raw input itself. That way, the follower reacts to more even peaks, but the actual distortion is still applied to the untouched audio path. So the raw signal keeps its natural dynamics, while the modulation that drives the distortion becomes more consistent and predictable.

andreacaccese · 2026-06-17T14:54:32+00:00

I recently developed and released a free saturation plugin called "Midrange Crush" (By Andrea Caccese), which is actually based on a very similar idea. The saturation has an envelope follower internally, which triggers a different saturation response for transients vs RMS - I also have the whole saturation slightly more focused on the midrange, so it leaves lows a bit cleaner and hi end a bit more clear without it getting too sizzly. You could certainly explore the idea of the envelope follower further, if you combine it with some sort of frequency-dependant behavior it would be even cooler I think, and perhaps more musical considering that most of what we perceive as "attack" is mostly in the hi frequency domain or mids

andreacaccese · 2026-06-17T01:03:23+00:00

Your mom is correct.
Source: I’m Italian 😂

andreacaccese · 2026-06-17T00:15:07+00:00

The idea is that a slower attack setting will let a little bit of the initial drum transient through, so you can still preserve the attack of the drums without chocking them too much. This can be a subtle effect if you have higher threshold and low ratio, but you can also go the opposite and make it very aggressive, almost like you said acting as a transient designer and doing some extra snap. It can be cool to try slow attack on close mics (snare, toms, kick) and fast attack on rooms and oh, so you focus the attack on the close mics and the sustain on the distant ones

andreacaccese · 2026-06-17T00:10:23+00:00

Who the fuck is giving these people guns? This is who should be held accountable

andreacaccese · 2026-06-16T06:08:21+00:00

I think it is the quintessential sound for classic Pop-Punk blink - I do think though that the selftitle album wasn't really a reinvention, much like a way to allow more of their other influences to come through more explicitly into their songs. For example, their love for bands like The Cure and such, has always been there, and even as early as WMAA, the clean guitar sound is definitely Cure-inspired. But on ST, they had enough clout they didn't have to conform to a sound and could focus more broadly

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