Episode 1

Matt introduces the project and the philosophy that guided the whole mix: Dr. Dog recorded "Fat Dog" in a cabin on an 8-track tape machine, and the worst thing a mixer could do is clean it up. Matt explains why he started the mix like a mastering engineer, setting the record's overall brightness with Pultecs on the 2-buss before processing a single track. Then he digs into the two-microphone drum recording: flipping polarity to get positive waveforms, nudging the kit mic in time to add punch to the snare, EQing kick and kit as one instrument, and saturating just the high frequencies with Saturn to mimic his favorite tape behavior. He finishes with the parallel treatments that gave the drums their own world, including the SansAmp trick Chad Blake made famous, and explains why the phase shift it introduces matters less than what the band hears.