Agent Palmer

Episode 14 features Henno Heitur, a musician, podcaster, and friend. We discuss audio production, learning by doing, recording an album, podcast jingles, and taking the leap from wanting to actually doing.

Henno stopped by to discuss the album he is recording with his band Doghouse. And what you are in for is an episode in two parts. Part one, where Henno tells me all about his past and present in recording and audio engineering plus what he’s learned about the process of recording an album in general, and part two where we discuss what passion projects mean, what it takes to put in the work and how that makes us fulfilled.

During the episode we discuss:

• Audio Engineering
• The Recording Process
• Equipment
• Producing
• Passion Projects
• Learning by doing
• Doing what you want
• Keeping it sustainable
• Putting in the work (time)
• And much more.

Mentioned and Helpful Links from This Episode

MTNpodcast.com

The Crazy Life Podcast

You can also hear more Palmer in the meantime on Our Liner Notes, a musical conversation podcast with host Chris Maier and as mentioned on this show as co-host of The Podcast Digest with Dan Lizette.

Music created and provided by Henno Heitur of Monkey Tongue Productions.

–End Show Notes Transmission–

–Begin Transcript–

00:00:00:12 – 00:00:28:32
Agent Palmer
Previously on Agent Palmer dot com. It’s what you learn after you know it all. The Earl Weaver Autobiography and A to Z list of movies I enjoy. And both Neal and I appreciate all of your support from the anxiety episode. This is The Palmer Files episode 14 with guest Hanno Heitur, a musician, podcaster, and friend. We discuss audio production, learning by doing, recording an album, podcast jingles, and taking the leap from wanting to doing so.

00:00:28:37 – 00:00:58:21
Agent Palmer
Let’s do the show.

00:00:58:26 – 00:01:23:24
Agent Palmer
Hello, and welcome to The Palmer Files. I’m your host, Jason Stershic, also known as Agent Palmer, and on this 14th episode is Hanno Heitur, podcaster, musician, world class jet skier and friend. You may have heard him on such shows is The Crazy Life or Moving the Needle, or perhaps even his previous gig co-hosting the Long running Gotham TV show fan cast Gotham Lights, which spun into The Orville lights, both of which are sadly no more.

00:01:23:29 – 00:01:45:35
Agent Palmer
Henno was here to discuss the album he is recording with his band Dog House, and What you Are In For is an episode in two parts, part one, where Henno tells me about his past and present in recording and audio engineering, plus what he’s learned about the process of recording an album in general, and part two, where we discuss what passion projects mean, what it takes to put in the work, and how that makes us fulfilled.

00:01:45:49 – 00:02:13:32
Agent Palmer
Both parts. We’re engaging, educating, and entertaining. And in the end, I hope you find this episode a bit motivating or at least inspiring. What is it you want to do? Think about that as you listen on. So if you want to discuss the episode as you listen or afterwards, you can tweet me at Agent Palmer. You can tweet the show at the Palmer Files, and you can tweet Henno at IDa Henno, that’s Idaho, and oh, you can hear him on The Crazy Life or moving the needle wherever you are listening to this show.

00:02:13:47 – 00:02:32:40
Agent Palmer
And don’t forget, you can see all of my writings and rantings on Agent palmer.com. And remember, all of these links and those mentioned in the show will be available in the show notes. So without further ado, let’s get into it.

00:02:32:45 – 00:02:53:53
Agent Palmer
Henno, I want to start off with a small fact about myself, and that is in high school when I was just getting ready to start thinking about what I was going to go to college for, there was a very, very, very small window of about four months where I was going to go to school for audio engineering.

00:02:53:58 – 00:03:18:13
Agent Palmer
And I feel like my background hanging around in bands and playing in bands and being willing to buy the mixers and stuff and playing with them is what spurred that on. And the realization that I’d never actually make anything of myself as a player. Yeah, because I knew where my skill set ended. But you, you’re not doing it as a profession, but you do it professionally.

00:03:18:18 – 00:03:20:34
Agent Palmer
So where did that start?

00:03:20:38 – 00:03:51:14
Henno Heitur
I think the introduction, what made me aware of audio recording was with the band that I was in in the 90s called Suck, because we had our own recording studio that was built by the bass player who happens to be an amazing carpenter, and they had like the room and then the glass and the mixing board behind it, and they’re using eight Dats, which were basically, way of digitally recording on to VHS tapes.

00:03:51:25 – 00:04:23:14
Henno Heitur
The first versions were horrible. They got better. There was digital tape machines going back to the 80s, but this was something that any consumer could have and use. Okay. And so that was the first time I was actually around part of a recording process prior to that, I had like when I learned my first quote unquote band, which was basically my guitar teacher saying, you should, hang out and and play with the drummer that works in shipping and handling here at the music store.

00:04:23:19 – 00:04:50:28
Henno Heitur
We used to go into the music store after hours when it was closed, so we’d mess around with recording equipment and record things and throw mikes up and stuff like that. But we there was nothing to it. Was no interest in it. I had it didn’t do anything for me at all. But with suc was the first time that I actually recorded, we recorded an EP, we were sending out tapes for label interest in that kind of thing, and it was the first time I’d actually been part of the process from beginning to end.

00:04:50:33 – 00:05:09:16
Henno Heitur
And even though it still was just this giant thing with a bunch of knobs and buttons on it that I didn’t quite understand, it was enough to when I was no longer in that band and decided I wanted to do my own thing getting a four track, a drum machine, all those things, you know, the minor things like a little reverb unit.

00:05:09:21 – 00:05:19:50
Henno Heitur
None of that was scary to me. It was fun. It was enjoyable, and I started recording my own songs and programing drums and that kind of thing.

00:05:20:04 – 00:05:29:27
Agent Palmer
Now, being a part of the process is one thing. Were you interested and aware of the process as far as the bands you were looking up to?

00:05:29:29 – 00:05:50:11
Henno Heitur
Not at all. That’s the thing. Eddie, who is our drummer, he’s a phenomenal musician. He play and songwriter, plays guitar and sings and plays drums. And he was the guy that was really into I mean, everyone was into music, sure, and a variety of music. But Eddie was the one that seemed to really key in on elements of it, and I never did.

00:05:50:24 – 00:06:23:23
Henno Heitur
I didn’t listen, if any sort of a critical ear, nothing wowed me as far as how something was done, the production value, and I never had that. It never even entered my brain until I started recording my own music. And I would say sucks existed from about 95 to 97 ish. And then for a couple of years, like I said, I messed around with a four track tape player and it was about 99, 2000 when I got my first computer and started doing computer recording.

00:06:23:27 – 00:06:32:22
Henno Heitur
It was at that time that I started to dive into the rabbit hole of what was possible, and it was at that point that I started to listen to music differently.

00:06:32:27 – 00:06:51:07
Agent Palmer
I presume it’s kind of like when you work with graphic designers long enough, you never see the world the same way ever again. Exactly. One project is all it takes. And they can be like, oh, well, the Koenig’s a little bit off and the the, the letting is a little weird. And those colors aren’t quite complimentary like they should.

00:06:51:07 – 00:07:07:14
Agent Palmer
And then all of a sudden you’re looking around, you know, maybe in a magazine there’s like a mistake and you notice it and you can’t go back. You can never go back. There’s at least two graphic designers in my life that I’m always like, fuck you. I was happy in my.

00:07:07:15 – 00:07:27:31
Henno Heitur
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I have done this to people. I have curse them with hearing music no longer in an enjoyable fashion, by pointing certain things out that some people appreciate it, others go, damn you! Why did you have to make me aware of this? Because now I can’t unhear it.

00:07:27:36 – 00:07:59:36
Agent Palmer
So when you were toying around on your own, was it to get the ideas out, or was it to experiment with what this technology does? Like you said, you had a four track, so was it move stuff? I mean, what I remember of the four track was first how to use it, and I had one of those Tascam Porta studios where it was like, all right, I can record an unlimited amount of tracks, but the only way to do that is to finalize four of the tracks and move three of them to track one, and then I can overdub two, three, and four.

00:07:59:36 – 00:08:24:23
Agent Palmer
And then if I want to do anything further, I got to move them over and keep, you know, ad nauseum. And it was like I almost had to just lay down like stupid riffs and stuff just to learn how to use the technology. And for me, it was almost better than like everything else, like just the understanding. But it was such, I was probably it was probably around the same era as you is like the late 90s, mid to late 90s.

00:08:24:23 – 00:08:28:19
Agent Palmer
And it was just kind of learn by doing. Was that your experience?

00:08:28:28 – 00:08:42:22
Henno Heitur
Yeah, it really it was getting in and experimenting at the time. The internet wasn’t quite the resource as it is today. So it was more about getting a couple of books maybe.

00:08:42:22 – 00:08:42:55
Agent Palmer
Sure.

00:08:42:55 – 00:09:09:17
Henno Heitur
Or just even just reading manuals. A lot of it I understood already in a general way, like you’re talking about bouncing tracks over to make space to record new ones. Those are all the things that I, I can’t recall exactly how I learned them, but it wasn’t like the last ten years of my life of recording music. And it also wasn’t about because I had never really been in a professional studio.

00:09:09:17 – 00:09:39:27
Henno Heitur
This was, you know, what John had built was basically just for us for to write music and have fun. And it was something that was enjoyable. It didn’t have that idea like, oh, this is a potential vacation, okay. And never had that outlook on it, ever. I never even considered it. I don’t know why. Well, I think it just comes down to again, like now I listen to podcasts on music production where the people are roughly my age, and so they’re talking about what they were doing when they were doing it.

00:09:39:31 – 00:09:58:08
Henno Heitur
And I can compare it to where I was at that time. And I was like, wow, we literally lived a couple of towns apart. There was no I could have been doing exactly what they were doing. There was no reason I couldn’t have been. It was just a matter of circumstances and what had been presented like, I never even considered it.

00:09:58:08 – 00:09:58:58
Henno Heitur
It was just for fun.

00:09:58:58 – 00:10:03:01
Agent Palmer
Yeah. What were the bands early on like? Suck was what kind of music?

00:10:03:01 – 00:10:21:05
Henno Heitur
Power pop. Okay, the last ten years is the most music I’ve done on a consistent basis. When I, when I left California because after suck, like I said, I did my own thing for a while. I started a band with that same drummer that I played with when I was 17 years old. We started a band called Whistle Bit.

00:10:21:05 – 00:10:43:11
Henno Heitur
We recorded our own music. I have some demos of that, you know, like I made an album of stuff that I recorded at my house. I would still play with with Eddie. Who is that? You know, now he was playing guitar and we would play live together. And then when that fell apart, I got into doing jet skiing and I did the jet skiing for about I mean, I actually competed, went to the world finals, all that kind of stuff.

00:10:43:11 – 00:11:07:45
Henno Heitur
And I did that pretty much until oh, six or so. And then that’s when I moved to Idaho. And when I moved to Idaho, I had sold pretty much everything except some PA gear and guitars, like all my amps. Anything that I just had. Still I got rid of. And when I came here, it was like everybody was a freaking guitar player.

00:11:07:58 – 00:11:28:48
Henno Heitur
I was not looking forward to starting to do music here at all. And then a friend told me that her sister was a singer, and at that time, I started playing just in the living room with a guy that I met. He was super into jam bands and I wasn’t, but it was really fun to learn something new and we were just playing covers.

00:11:28:53 – 00:11:51:58
Henno Heitur
It was a good opportunity for me to look at creativity within, playing other people’s music, because I was very much against it, because I was kind of one of the reasons our band fell apart was because of of cover bands. Main thing was, I’m going to let go of all the things that held me back as a musician early, early on in the attitudes and the ego and all this stuff and the judgments and that.

00:11:52:03 – 00:12:15:17
Henno Heitur
And so when we had this opportunity to play with my friend Haley, sister, here comes Danny. She’s very standoffish, noncommittal, and she walks in and we start playing a, a funky version of Come Together by the Beatles. When we get to the part where it says, And one thing I can tell you is you got to be free.

00:12:15:22 – 00:12:27:09
Henno Heitur
She just goes up to this other range, and I literally stopped playing and just started laughing because it was so unbelievably amazing. And I never got to.

00:12:27:09 – 00:12:30:59
Agent Palmer
Write, like, you just it’s out of left field. You’re not. You’re not even expecting it.

00:12:31:02 – 00:12:54:54
Henno Heitur
Yeah. She was singing with. I’d never heard her sing, ever. I’d heard a little bit of her history and she’s just. She’s singing soft skirt. Great voice. Sings like spot on on key. You can tell that she knows what she’s doing. And then all of a sudden, this sound comes out and I don’t think I’ve ever. My friend Margot was the only singer I’d ever been around, and we recorded some music together.

00:12:54:54 – 00:13:11:40
Henno Heitur
Who to me, it was like. It was like a painter with a paint palette, you know, like, okay, what colors do you want? So I’d been around people that could really, you know, like someone that could really sing, but it was something different about it that it was happening. You know, we had just had headphones on playing in this living room.

00:13:11:44 – 00:13:36:21
Henno Heitur
Then the next time we get together, she has a binder and all the songs are in the binder. Totally organized, and she has pages and pages of lyrics, and she wrote lyrics like, some people write poetry. She wrote lyrics. She put her thoughts down in a lyrical form, meaning that in her head she heard either a rhythm or a melody or something.

00:13:36:26 – 00:14:04:30
Henno Heitur
So all I had to do was play some chords. It was all there already. If she didn’t have a melody, we could create one. And the timing was there already for songwriting and that was the beginning of me getting back into music after easily a decade of not really taking it seriously. And we started a band. I started picking up some recording gear because I already was familiar with computer recording.

00:14:04:35 – 00:14:12:02
Henno Heitur
That wasn’t scary for me at all, and it was still expensive, but not that expensive.

00:14:12:11 – 00:14:17:44
Agent Palmer
The price had come down, I would presume quite a bit since the last time you were looking into this stuff.

00:14:17:44 – 00:14:25:19
Henno Heitur
And the quality had gone up a lot, and now we have the vast resources known as the internet.

00:14:25:19 – 00:14:25:55
Agent Palmer
Sure.

00:14:25:55 – 00:14:47:28
Henno Heitur
And there were lots of online groups and places where you could get information, and everyone had chat rooms. And I started doing the deep dive into recording and trying to learn as much as I could, because that’s how I am. You know that the asset that can become a liability is that I get more locked up into the research than I am into the doing.

00:14:47:33 – 00:14:52:25
Agent Palmer
Okay. I want to be understanding is starts to overtake anything else.

00:14:52:34 – 00:15:18:00
Henno Heitur
And it’s it’s very common with artists. I talk to artists over and over again. It doesn’t pick your type of art. And I, you know, somebody has gone down this path and over and over and over again, you’ll see, like you’ll see somebody post on a on some message board about this Mike, that Mike, blah, blah, blah. And somebody always say, fucking walk away from your goddamn computer and just make some music.

00:15:18:07 – 00:15:43:08
Henno Heitur
And who the fuck cares is it? I read it all the time and I will hear that with any kind of arts, visual arts, photography, blah, blah, blah, because it’s easy now to just get lost in do I suck or does my gear suck? Is there some way? Is there a magic button that can make me better? And the reality is, is you just have to get out there and go for it and do it.

00:15:43:13 – 00:15:47:03
Henno Heitur
And yeah, sometimes gear helps. You know it.

00:15:47:13 – 00:16:06:42
Agent Palmer
Let me, let me ask because I process is important though. I mean, I remember that while we didn’t have any idea what we were doing, we were basically fumbling in the dark without a flashlight and I’m sure it could have sounded better, but we were kind of fumbling around like, there is something to the knowledge of, like where you place the mics.

00:16:06:42 – 00:16:34:13
Agent Palmer
And we were just doing this in a basement, you know, like I. Yeah. So how much of that do you now know? I mean, are you covered? Is there still more for you to dive into? Like as far as that goes? Or has what you’ve learned already melded with the experience you’ve got where like you can look at a room, you can figure out your mike placement and you know, you’re pretty solid on where things should go and whether it’s learned or innate.

00:16:34:13 – 00:16:38:41
Agent Palmer
You know, I’m not I’m not asking that question. But you’re there, right? Like you’ve done enough. You’ve read.

00:16:38:41 – 00:16:56:58
Henno Heitur
Enough. So right now I’m in the process of recording an album with one of the bands I play in, and I was playing in two bands last year. I started playing bass. My main instrument is guitar. I’ve been a guitar player my whole life. I’ve learned enough about bass playing to play bass on my own music, and it just bass.

00:16:56:58 – 00:17:32:41
Henno Heitur
Players are unicorns where I live, so if you play bass, you can get into a band. It’s easy. Like I said, there’s a million guitar players in the band dog house that I’m playing and recording with now. We all write music, everybody in the band writes, and we had enough music to record an album. I had decided to take the winter off, not ski, and take an opportunity to focus on doing this album, and I have brought all of this knowledge and the great news is I’m finally getting the results that I’ve wanted because I have done so.

00:17:32:41 – 00:17:53:08
Henno Heitur
I built my own studio. I had, like a loft apartment that was in a commercial area. So I had a garage below, and I took half the garage, and I built a studio, and I built it legit with the double walls all the soundproofing. And then I did all my inside stuff, and I learned, you know, what not to do, what to do, what’s worth it, what’s not worth it.

00:17:53:13 – 00:18:13:22
Henno Heitur
And in the meantime, you know, you hear an album that was released that somebody had recorded, you know, in their basement with no audio treatments whatsoever on the cheapest equipment ever. And it’s a massive hit, right? Yeah. And it’s that thing it comes back to, which is a great performance, is a great performance. It doesn’t matter what it’s recorded on.

00:18:13:27 – 00:18:43:23
Henno Heitur
I mean, yeah, something can be really bad, but like a lot of a lot of hits that we hear, oftentimes the vocal is the original vocal that was done on a demo. And because of the urgency of the artist getting their thoughts down, they could never duplicate it again. They could go in to the most professional studio ever with the best sound and the best equipment ever, and they could not match that original recording on a handheld recorder or something.

00:18:43:32 – 00:19:07:24
Henno Heitur
And so they make it happen. Right? And this is that thing, that interesting paradox of, you can go down this massive rabbit hole and this person can do this thing, you know, with the least amount of stuff, the least amount of money. And it’s great. But bringing this back around, dog House wanted to record. We have a couple studios in the area, but I want to do this.

00:19:07:24 – 00:19:29:53
Henno Heitur
I want to record the band. It’s going to save us a ton of money. It’s something I want to do. I don’t have a studio anymore. I have all of the audio treatments are basically where I’m sitting right now doing, you know, talking to you. I have them all around the room around me. My space is basically what would be considered like a mixing room where I’ve set this place up for mixing.

00:19:29:58 – 00:19:51:32
Henno Heitur
I can record in here too, but like, you know, a car goes by, you’re going to hear the car go by. It’s my house, you know. But I’ve learned big deal. I don’t care about that anymore. I’m into, you know, doing you know, everything that I was doing prior to this band. You know, I do podcasts, intros and outros and songs and, you know, on your podcast.

00:19:51:37 – 00:20:02:45
Henno Heitur
That’s me. Yeah. By the way. Yes. The outro piece that I told you that was probably I didn’t get it developed into a song. Yep. Is going to be on the dog House album.

00:20:02:49 – 00:20:04:04
Agent Palmer
That’s fantastic.

00:20:04:04 – 00:20:21:14
Henno Heitur
And it’s amazing. And here’s the scary part. We started recording last Saturday. We’re still rewriting that thing right now. We had one week, two Thursdays, two Saturdays, because once the drums are set up with the microphones on them, we can’t move them. Yeah.

00:20:21:16 – 00:20:23:49
Agent Palmer
No, I mean, you have to you’ve got to get it all done.

00:20:23:49 – 00:20:47:49
Henno Heitur
I mean, we can, but it’s going to be slightly different. And so you try to do as much as you can by not messing with the stuff. So the last thing you want to be doing in an ideal world, every great rock and roll album, let’s just take Pearl jam ten as an example. Sure, they spent a month rehearsing for that with a producer.

00:20:47:49 – 00:20:47:58
Henno Heitur
Yeah.

00:20:47:58 – 00:21:10:09
Agent Palmer
Before, because you don’t you want to know what you’re doing before you hit record, right? I mean, that’s that’s the the gist of it is, you know, whether you’re with a producer, whether you’re, you know, sequestered off in a cabin somewhere. Let’s get the chord changes down. Let’s get the progressions down. Let’s get the solos down. You know, at a certain point, it’s not about money for like, oh, well, we have the studio for however long we want it.

00:21:10:09 – 00:21:27:46
Agent Palmer
And we’re, you know, we’re paying for it and that’s. But you want to get it down. You want to be able to turn around after a day, a week and say, like, we did this, we put these down. You know, maybe there’s a couple versions, but that stuff doesn’t happen because it’s like, hey, I know I have an idea for a song.

00:21:27:46 – 00:21:33:50
Agent Palmer
Let’s hit record and see what happens. Now, I know that happens sometimes. That’s not the way albums are done.

00:21:33:50 – 00:21:45:42
Henno Heitur
Well, that’s how that’s how I learned about recording. Okay, so when you’ve got your own recording studio, that’s how you do it. And I mean, there’s there’s basically four ways you can record to simplify it. What.

00:21:45:42 – 00:21:46:32
Agent Palmer
Are the four ways.

00:21:46:36 – 00:22:09:27
Henno Heitur
So one, everyone is in the same room playing live together at the same time. Okay. Beatles. Right. Abbey road. All the amps are in the same room. All the drums. Everything’s in the same room. Yep. Frank Sinatra, you know, Beach Boys, you name it, right? Yep. And yes, they used multitrack techniques and all that stuff. However, the basic track was all together in the same room.

00:22:09:31 – 00:22:32:08
Henno Heitur
Guitars are bleeding into drums, drums are bleeding into guitars. It’s a take. Yep. You’re going for the best take. Option number two things are isolated. So the problem with option number one is you can’t go back and fix one person’s mess up because you’re all bleeding into each other’s microphones. And it’s part of the sound. It’s part of the energy, but you can’t fix it.

00:22:32:13 – 00:22:52:58
Henno Heitur
Option number two. And now let’s go to Springsteen’s band. They go into a studio and this is a great story. They go into the studio to record their famous album, born U.S.A. the drums are in the main room, and there was this technique of recording where you had a dead side of a room and a live side of a room is okay.

00:22:53:01 – 00:23:04:22
Henno Heitur
It goes back to the 70s. And so they had the drums in the in the dead side of the room all miked up. Everyone’s in the room together, but everyone’s amplifiers are in little booths around.

00:23:04:24 – 00:23:14:01
Agent Palmer
Okay, so everybody’s hearing, you’re playing live, but everything’s isolated. So if I play one wrong note, we can fix it in post. And it’s not bleeding. Yep. Okay.

00:23:14:01 – 00:23:35:22
Henno Heitur
The first way you can combine takes, but it’s literally like okay, at the guitar solo we’re going to switch to take number, you know number six. But you can’t go through and just say we’re going to use the verse from here. I mean, you can, but it’s a lot harder because you’re not playing. You just have, too many things mixing together.

00:23:35:27 – 00:23:50:02
Henno Heitur
The tempo could be slightly different. Whatever. So this second wave, it’s all isolated, so you can’t go back and replace things if you want to. And one of the fun things about that album, and now you will go back and listen to this is this, we had our wooden.

00:23:50:02 – 00:23:51:01
Agent Palmer
Stuff for us and I.

00:23:51:02 – 00:24:10:23
Henno Heitur
Was like, no, no, this is actually enjoyable. You’ll love this. So Bruce Springsteen comes down and the mixing engineer is doing an initial mix and he’s got all the drums. Like I said, they’re all the. And Bruce goes, oh, what are these two over here? It’s like, oh, those are those two mikes that we stuck on the other side of the room, up on the ceiling, and he goes, oh, let me hear those.

00:24:10:34 – 00:24:30:43
Henno Heitur
And the guy pushes him up and he’s like, yeah, that’s it right there. And he keeps pushing him up. And then the mixing engineer takes him back down, finishes his mix well, Bruce comes down and he sees that those those faders are down again. And he’s like push those back up. And pretty much says if you touch those faders, you’re walking out the door.

00:24:30:48 – 00:24:56:38
Henno Heitur
And that’s the sound of that album. The reason the drums are huge is because Bruce was like, I love this sound. At the time, it wasn’t that popular to do that. That’s the bottom microphone in a staircase. A famous sound of LED Zeppelin. Okay, is this room. But the third way is the band plays together, but they’re playing to a click track, okay?

00:24:56:40 – 00:25:12:42
Henno Heitur
And that’s what we’re doing. I want to have really good editing capabilities. And like I said, it’s hard to edit best versus best this best that. If you’re not playing to a click track, your drummer has to be amazingly consistent. Well, it’s.

00:25:12:42 – 00:25:25:32
Agent Palmer
Not just your drummer. You know, if you, as the bass player, come in even like a half a moment too soon on a verse, then you can’t interchange that verse with another one. So it’s it’s.

00:25:25:32 – 00:25:31:55
Henno Heitur
Also very difficult for other musicians to come in afterwards and play along. It’s easier when there’s that click.

00:25:32:00 – 00:25:35:41
Agent Palmer
Yeah. If you want to overdub or layer like a bunch of yeah things. Okay.

00:25:35:48 – 00:25:56:00
Henno Heitur
And so what we’re doing with this album is kind of version number three, where we are in the same room together, but our focus is just getting drum sounds and we’re just direct recording. Guitars are going direct. The singer is singing in the room, but they’re separated enough and the drums aren’t going to pick up that voice. But there’s no guitar amps being played.

00:25:56:00 – 00:26:08:54
Henno Heitur
Everything is just going direct in the computer as a as a reference. Okay. And we’re basically shooting to get drum sounds and we’re playing to a click track, but we’re playing together so that the drummer has the feel of the band still.

00:26:09:06 – 00:26:21:22
Agent Palmer
And a reference to the song too, because otherwise you can. I mean, I can only imagine that memorizing an entire song and then being told to play it without the song is not easy by any stretch.

00:26:21:27 – 00:26:46:48
Henno Heitur
It depends on the musician. It really comes down to then how how experienced musician is. Because that’s really number four. Pretty much how I learned to record is I record a guitar and vocal track to a click track, and then I have a drummer record to my guide track, but there’s no interaction between us and there’s no the dynamics just aren’t there yet.

00:26:46:50 – 00:26:48:47
Agent Palmer
So it’s so it’s layered, but you’re doing.

00:26:48:47 – 00:27:09:13
Henno Heitur
Something else for dynamics, right? So you’re you’re you’re like you’re talking about you’re layering. Most of your pop music today is like this. Where or hip hop where it’s a beat and somebody builds. They start with a beat. That’s you know, it could be loops, keyboards, whatever. They build a backing track and then they do whatever they do over the top of it.

00:27:09:13 – 00:27:29:09
Henno Heitur
Both they’re utilizing is they’re utilizing the instruments and the voices and whatever to build energy because you can’t fluctuate the timing. I mean, you can nowadays, but you typically don’t like a great example of this would be Prince doing all of his own music. So sure.

00:27:29:09 – 00:27:35:24
Agent Palmer
Because he can’t play more than one instrument at the same. I mean, but he’s he’s. Yeah, you could try. But like he’s going to layer style.

00:27:35:25 – 00:27:53:19
Henno Heitur
He would he would go in and crank out a song, a recording in a night. There’s a great story of where he came down to give one of his songs to, you know, I don’t know if it’s The Bangles or whoever it was, but it was it was somebody who was down in LA, and this is where he finally he finally found the studio that the sound that he wanted.

00:27:53:24 – 00:28:11:00
Henno Heitur
And they these people were in there, a room in the a room. And he goes, you know, maybe I don’t want to give you the song. Hey, can I go into the b room and work this out? Three hours later, he comes back and the song kiss is finished. And now what an interesting thing about the song kisses.

00:28:11:05 – 00:28:33:00
Henno Heitur
There’s no bass on it at all. It’s guitar, it’s a little drum. And the record company was like, there’s no bass on this. What? What are we going to do with this? And he says, you’re going to put the fucker out. And they’re like, this is dumb. This isn’t going to work right? And that studio, that studio or whatever it was ended up being the exact.

00:28:33:05 – 00:28:55:36
Henno Heitur
So when he built Paisley Park, he’s like, got someone to go down there and get all the specs from that studio and basically built those that paisley because he loved how it sounded. He knew how it worked. But that’s the kind of example where somebody just layers things together. It’s all with a drum machine. Sure, you can add some, you know, a little bit of swing in this or that, but you’re you’re using the elements of the music to create the vibe in the energy.

00:28:55:41 – 00:29:16:49
Henno Heitur
Because you’re not playing live, you’re not doing it together. You’re not going to have dynamics like that. And so we’re trying to do a hybrid version of this. And one of the examples is, and this is getting back to this idea of here we are writing songs in the middle of recording, which is that dumb idea. But we can do this because we’re playing to a click track.

00:29:16:54 – 00:29:38:38
Henno Heitur
Our goal is to get just good drums and one of the ways we’re doing this is we’ll go like I we recorded all day Saturday. We got four songs done. We did a demo of this one song and I just said, this is bad. We can do better than this, you know? And this is the part where I’m learning to be a producer is say, no, this.

00:29:38:43 – 00:29:41:37
Henno Heitur
I’d rather not do this song or we do it better.

00:29:41:37 – 00:29:51:07
Agent Palmer
Before we move further, let me ask how much freedom or was it overwhelming the first time you when I.

00:29:51:07 – 00:30:08:03
Henno Heitur
Started with a computer. So I have none of those hang ups that other recording engineers have with tape, with faders, with having this hands on approach. Mine is all been about a mouse and a keyboard always.

00:30:08:12 – 00:30:26:24
Agent Palmer
So how does all of this inform what you’re working on right now? Yeah, I mean, obviously you want people to when it’s released by the disc, but when you’re actually in post, there’s all this information. Does it have an impact?

00:30:26:24 – 00:30:44:03
Henno Heitur
You you asked me about all that information, all that studying and everything that I’ve learned over the last ten years and how it’s coming into play now and how it’s come into play is this is a few months ago, I knew that we were going to be playing above a garage in a room that had absolutely no treatments on the walls whatsoever.

00:30:44:08 – 00:31:07:56
Henno Heitur
It’s a tiny room. It’s going to have echoes that are not pleasant. So we need to make it dead. But you need to make it dead. Or if you can make something two dead, which is an anechoic chamber where literally you could hear the sound of your own hearing. The one thing that I don’t want is I don’t want what makes a great recording studio great is the room itself.

00:31:07:58 – 00:31:34:17
Henno Heitur
You get to hear the room. That’s why Bruce Springsteen pushed up those faders, because he loved the sound of that big room. Okay, I don’t get to do that. I’ve recorded in a in a huge warehouse before and it sounded fantastic. I’ve also recorded it in very dead spaces, and it sounded horror or it’s also sounded fantastic. And that comes down to the musician, the instrument, how you capture it.

00:31:34:17 – 00:32:04:11
Henno Heitur
All of these things play into it. I had to do really bad and really good. I had to have really bad examples and really good examples to learn. Okay, it wasn’t just me, it was this kick drum that this drummer has is just was garbage. It had nothing to do with me. And one of the things about, you know, like were when you and I are talking and if we’re hearing an echo because let’s say we’re sitting too close to a wall, you can throw some foam up on that wall.

00:32:04:11 – 00:32:29:37
Henno Heitur
Any old foam, it’s going to get rid of that echo. It’s going to get rid of that bounce because it’s going to absorb it because the voice is at a certain frequency. It’s very easy to tame that music, and especially a drum set has very low frequencies. And if you coat everything and you know, the whole thing, like old carpet on the walls, you know, by the way, the whole air crate thing, total bullshit and does nothing.

00:32:29:42 – 00:32:48:53
Henno Heitur
But let’s say you put carpet on the walls or an floor, ceiling or foam all you’ve done is you’ve dealt with the upper frequencies. You’ve done nothing to deal with the low frequencies, and you end up with with what’s called a boom room, where you don’t have a lot of high frequencies, but the low frequencies are going crazy.

00:32:48:58 – 00:33:11:22
Henno Heitur
And I had to compromise here because I wasn’t going to drag my mixing room. I have the audio treatments to tame the low frequencies up to the high frequencies. I wasn’t going to bring all the stuff to the studio, so I started building some stuff, and I compromised in a way where I was going to make it better, but I wasn’t going to make it perfect.

00:33:11:26 – 00:33:30:56
Henno Heitur
And then it came down to like for the, for example, the kick drum. They brought the kick drum in, he hit it and it was like huge. It was booming, ginormous. And I’m like, oof, Lord! Like when I put a microphone on the other side of the room, like in the stairway, all you heard was this kick drum.

00:33:31:01 – 00:33:39:04
Henno Heitur
I’m like, all right, I’m not going to pick a microphone that grabs low frequencies. I’m going to grab a microphone that grabs higher frequencies.

00:33:39:04 – 00:33:45:56
Agent Palmer
So you don’t have to necessarily. You’re using the proper tool instead of rearranging the entire room necessarily.

00:33:45:56 – 00:34:06:42
Henno Heitur
Yes. There’s ways that you can get away with this. One of the things is this is this was a really big thing for me. I don’t do a lot of mixing, so we’re going to probably have somebody else in the Valley that’s got really good ears to do the mixing. We actually reached out to him. It was suggested that I reach out to him and send what we’re recording to him and get his opinion about it.

00:34:06:49 – 00:34:11:52
Henno Heitur
That’s like a man asking for directions.

00:34:11:57 – 00:34:34:05
Henno Heitur
But I’ve had growth in my life and I didn’t have a problem saying, hey, Chip, what are you hearing? This is what I’m hearing. I would like your opinion. It was a very adulting thing for me to do. And it was great because the feedback, what his suggestions were, was amazing. It was what I was hearing to sound like awesome.

00:34:34:09 – 00:34:53:51
Henno Heitur
One of the things that happens is this is another kind of fun thing. When you listen to a recording, listen to how the drums are. Oftentimes the drums, especially with alternative music or like folk music, not your really polished country or rock. You’ll hear in like a lot of alternative music. The drums are just right up in the middle.

00:34:53:56 – 00:35:14:17
Henno Heitur
Everything’s in the middle. When you hear the the banging, the toms, banging the cymbals, it’s not like Neil Peart and Rush word. The toms go from left to right. What did you do? Tutu, tutu, tutu right there. All right in the middle. And that could be done for various reasons. It could be done for taste, but it also can be done because you’re in a tiny room and you stick up.

00:35:14:26 – 00:35:15:13
Henno Heitur
You don’t have.

00:35:15:14 – 00:35:17:18
Agent Palmer
Enough room for 15 toms.

00:35:17:22 – 00:35:37:09
Henno Heitur
Yeah, well, and you don’t have room for putting microphones 35ft away at the ceiling. So Bruce Springsteen, you can go over and lift up those two faders and it sounds like an amazing image every all the sounds bouncing around the walls. And it just is all smeared and weird sounding. And so that was our focus here was, here’s a great example.

00:35:37:22 – 00:36:00:26
Henno Heitur
Exile on Main Street, Rolling Stones. Yeah, the drums are recorded with three microphones. It’s called the Glenn Glenn Johns Method. Glenn Johns came up with this way of putting three microphones on a drum set and making it work. There’s a million different drummers that have recorded with the Glenn Johns method. They sound amazing. Now, granted, these great microphones, they got great drum set.

00:36:00:26 – 00:36:11:07
Henno Heitur
And here’s the great thing about that. Let’s say the drummer comes back and says, oh man, that cymbal. All I hear is that cymbal. Well, hit the cymbal less hard, dummy.

00:36:11:12 – 00:36:13:25
Agent Palmer
It’s on the player now. I mean, that’s at that.

00:36:13:25 – 00:36:33:51
Henno Heitur
Point you need to play balanced. Three mics are great if you can play balanced, if you’ve got too heavy a foot too heavy a hand, something like that, that’s you know, a lot of drummers have gotten used to where there’s a mic on every single instrument, and so they can go in and mix it all. But back then, they didn’t have all those tracks like we do today with Digital World, so they were limited.

00:36:34:00 – 00:36:50:43
Henno Heitur
So like, for example, I was saying, let’s try a modified Glenn Johns method. So I stuck up the three mics, I did some other mics around it, I recorded it, send it to Chip, and Chip said, yeah, that’s not going to work. You need to just do close miking. Everything. And I was like, yeah, I’m with you on that.

00:36:50:47 – 00:37:07:39
Henno Heitur
And I was hearing this big boom on the snare, and Jason brought in a different snare. And like I said, with kick drum, I tried this mic, I tried another mic and we did about this is not what I wanted to do, but I had one night to make up the drum set and listen to what it sounded like and make the changes.

00:37:07:43 – 00:37:17:31
Henno Heitur
The next time we got together I was recording. Not ideal, but I’m getting the best drum sound I have ever recorded.

00:37:17:31 – 00:37:29:25
Agent Palmer
What’s the what’s the rest of the process like that? I mean, you’re going to get the drums down. So as an example, from what I understand of the intro to this show and the outro that was all you write.

00:37:29:30 – 00:37:53:44
Henno Heitur
So that’s a drum loop. Yep. That’s me. Typically with a this is actually kind of fun. The intro for this show is something I recorded on my four track in 1998, and at some point before I got rid of my four track, I’ve made it digital and, you know, and I’ve told you this, but now the audience knows when you came to me and you and I said, well, what are you hearing?

00:37:53:44 – 00:37:55:53
Henno Heitur
And you sent me some, some. Yeah.

00:37:55:53 – 00:37:57:50
Agent Palmer
I sent you a playlist of like, a playlist.

00:37:57:50 – 00:38:20:03
Henno Heitur
Yeah. I got to the second song and I’m like, oh, I know exactly what this is. And so I went into my computer and I hunted this thing down, which was not easy, because my method of cataloging was not really all that clear. I eventually found it, and then I rerecorded it, and what I did is I found a drum loop that was close to the tempo, and I then played along with that drum loop.

00:38:20:08 – 00:38:42:26
Henno Heitur
I recorded all the guitar parts and then, you know, I recorded bass, and then I went through and I massaged the drum loops by just basically cut, paste this and that, tweak a little here and there. What we’re doing now is we have an actual drummer and he can play to a click, which is crucial. Like I said, we’re all in the same room playing together.

00:38:42:31 – 00:39:03:19
Henno Heitur
There’s, you know, the mic bleed stuff is an issue. And when we’re doing about three full takes of a song, maybe a couple of maybe a half take or a section, and then the drummer and I will go through and we will pick the best parts that we like and piece them together. Then we’re going to do exactly what I did for your intro.

00:39:03:28 – 00:39:36:43
Henno Heitur
But instead of playing to a drum loop, we’re going to be playing two actual drums. Whether we do it together alone. But then we’ll be having actual mics on guitars, that kind of thing. The vocals will be done, and that’s why we call that tracking, because you’re you’re literally going track by track by track by track. You don’t have the same feel as a live recording because you’re not all in the same room together, but the thing for me was that the drummer, even though we’re playing to a click track, the drummer is hearing the way the songs are always performed.

00:39:36:48 – 00:39:59:12
Henno Heitur
So he changes his dynamics based on how he feels the song and it’s worked. It’s worked phenomenally because he he had the one. We have, one song where I knew that we had to have both guitar players playing because the energy of the song and you could feel it. He did this one take where I was like, that’s it, we’re done.

00:39:59:16 – 00:40:20:37
Henno Heitur
Like, I knew that was the take, that there was no no question about it. We even tried one more take and I’m like, nope, nothing’s going to. He just he felt it. He went for it. He beat the crap out of those drums in a few spots. It was awesome. Right now, the couple songs that we’re rearranging right now, they’re more instrumentals.

00:40:20:42 – 00:40:40:36
Henno Heitur
They don’t have that same kind of interaction. They have dynamics, but because they’re instrumental, there’s none of that. There’s not the mood that you get from, you know, a vocal line or a harmony or something that, that, that inspires you. There a little more. It’s it’s, you know, we have elements of, you know, like prog rock in there.

00:40:40:40 – 00:41:05:38
Henno Heitur
We have elements of, you know, like odd times and things like that because it’s an instrumental. This one is going to be it’s not as crucial. And as a matter of fact, I went into the studio the last two nights to record guide tracks for the drummer, just in case we can’t pull this off by Saturday, because, like last night, the singer, like, I’m one of those.

00:41:05:43 – 00:41:27:27
Henno Heitur
I’ve never been a great musician. I’m not super talented, but I’ve got these weird qualities that really come in handy. And one of them is is just being able to memorize something and remember the patterns. And so I’m really good at that. It’s what what makes it possible for me to like double track vocals, double track guitar parts.

00:41:27:32 – 00:41:49:43
Henno Heitur
Because I just remember what I did the first time and I can duplicate it. I know singers that literally cannot come in and duplicate the line that they just sang before it, but they’re super talented, and so that’s kind of like my one of my little toolbox things is by Saturday I will know these songs and our singer won’t, but it’s okay because he doesn’t have to.

00:41:49:43 – 00:42:19:19
Agent Palmer
It sounds to me like you’ve turned a corner somewhere, and while you have all of the technical down like this is producer hanno, because like your, your ear, your your mastery of the process and the ability to drive the bus where it needs to go, like it just sounds like after having done this for yourself for so long, it’s time for you to lead with everything you know now.

00:42:19:21 – 00:42:44:47
Henno Heitur
Yeah. And that’s the fun part about this project for me has been. Yes. The recording engineer. But I’m not the recording engineer. I was five, six years ago when I had a studio, and I was so concerned about what is going to sound like I’m actually having a lot of fun when when I found out that I just had, I had one day to demo drums and then the next set up, that was that, right?

00:42:44:51 – 00:43:02:09
Henno Heitur
I was okay with it. I walked in and I said, we’re going to have fun. You know, hopefully there’s nothing really horrible that happens, but everything can be worked. And, you know, this is the sound of this room. This is the sound that we’re getting, and we’re just going to work with it. And I’m not going to get obsessed about it.

00:43:02:09 – 00:43:22:58
Henno Heitur
I’m not going to say. And it just so happens that, you know, I looked at Jason and Jason is he’s an amazing musician. He writes songs. His family is, you know, musical. He’s played in a lot of studios. And he c told me that this is honestly one of the best drum sounds I’ve ever had. And I’m like, you just totally fucking with me, you know?

00:43:23:02 – 00:43:44:03
Henno Heitur
But every night that I go home and I do a quick mix on something to send to everybody, I’m not working that hard. It’s actually easy. And one of my big issues is I have a hard time with low frequencies and how much to put in, because I happen to love metal. And when I get in my car or on my headphones, I have I do a lot of bass.

00:43:44:08 – 00:44:02:40
Henno Heitur
That’s not a good way to make yourself a good mixing engineer. And so I have a really hard time with low end. And what happens is, is that, you know, it might all of a sudden not sound so good on a tiny little system on your phone. And I came home and I’m like, everything’s translating. It’s awesome. This is great.

00:44:02:45 – 00:44:37:35
Henno Heitur
And it allowed me to just say, cool, we’re going to have some fun. And have we had issues? Yes. We have. There was the the first song we played was kind of mellow. The second song was a lot louder, and the levels started getting pushed. But you know what? I can fix that. That’s not a problem. The fun part has been the production aspects of it, and this is where what I wanted to bring to this session was the knowledge that I’ve learned by listening to podcasts and reading magazines, and reading recordings of about how things were recorded.

00:44:37:40 – 00:45:00:16
Henno Heitur
Is to learn from the best and how they how they got their best work. Sure, I wanted 30 days of rehearsing these songs. That’s not going to happen when your band mates all have jobs, they have families. They have other bands they play in. We can get together maybe once a week if we’re lucky, if schedules permit. That wasn’t going to happen.

00:45:00:23 – 00:45:30:00
Henno Heitur
All right. So we’re going to do our best. And then I’m going to come in and think about the things that a lot of people don’t think about, which is are we all hitting this chord at the same time? You know, I listened to the demo that doghouse did before, and it was interesting because their bass player is actually a music teacher, and he left the band because he got a job with the Boise Philharmonic Orchestra.

00:45:30:05 – 00:45:49:46
Henno Heitur
This guy plays stand up bass, you name a bay. He he plays in orchestras, he plays double bass. He’s he is an amazing bass player. I listened to the recording and I was like, it’s not this is not a knock on him. It’s the band themselves. They’re not playing together. One guy is playing his part, the other is playing their part.

00:45:49:59 – 00:46:09:25
Henno Heitur
But nobody ever sat down and had a conversation that, are we playing something that’s complementary or not? And I could hear it. I was here’s like, okay, that guy’s hitting, you know, that particular note on an upbeat while the other guy is hitting it on a downbeat that’s not tight. That makes something not feel tight. It feels kind of loose.

00:46:09:30 – 00:46:31:26
Henno Heitur
And so that’s where I was like, this is where I’m going to make my difference with this is bring in those little bits. Like I focus on timing, I focus on tempos. I focus on how we’re going from one section of a song to another section of a song. And sometimes I bring stuff up and I get this look back at me like, you know, I’m speaking in foreign language, which is fine.

00:46:31:31 – 00:46:54:13
Henno Heitur
That means this is a great opportunity for all of us to learn something. Yeah. And what I love about this group of guys is our primary. I call him he’s our he’s our team captain. He’s our lead singer. He’s the guy that, you know, whose house we play at. He’s a doctor, has his own practice. We’re talking Type-A to go through medical school and all that.

00:46:54:18 – 00:47:12:38
Henno Heitur
To start your own practice, you have to have the right personality for that. The guitar player who, incidentally, is, an amazing. He’s a better bass player than I will ever be, but he plays guitar, too. He doesn’t have perfect pitch, but he pretty much has that ability to, like, hear something once and then just play it. Okay?

00:47:12:38 – 00:47:34:42
Henno Heitur
It really irritates the crap out of me, but I also love it because it makes learning stuff so easy. If, like Brian, how do I play this? You know, he is a dentist who owns his own business and it’s a big operation. I happen to go to him. And it’s also very nice to know that all of my Invisalign and everything went to guitars and amplifiers.

00:47:34:47 – 00:47:41:25
Henno Heitur
But those guys come in to the studio and they leave that stuff behind.

00:47:41:30 – 00:47:44:47
Agent Palmer
Yeah, this is it. It’s fun. It’s something that’s.

00:47:44:48 – 00:47:45:54
Henno Heitur
Amazing they.

00:47:45:54 – 00:47:56:45
Agent Palmer
Can do to unwind. And I feel like you probably get more out of them than if they were doing this for money, because it’s it’s refreshing to them.

00:47:56:45 – 00:48:16:23
Henno Heitur
Like, I listen to them, they because they both own their own businesses. They will be discussing what any business owner goes through. And I just go, wow, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that in our band setting. And you know, I feel appreciated for the time that I put in to building all these sound treatments and the extra hours.

00:48:16:23 – 00:48:35:04
Henno Heitur
And, you know, one point Tom was like, I want to pay you. And it’s another one of those things where instantly I just go, money. You know, I don’t want to talk about it because I do this because I love to do it. It’s the same reason that I love to write jingles and songs and stuff for podcasts and spots.

00:48:35:09 – 00:48:58:15
Henno Heitur
It’s something I enjoy doing. I have a day job, it pays my bills. It’s something I also love to do. But the idea of talking about money when it comes to my my passion makes me want to run out the door. But I want, you know, they want to express their appreciation. And so I didn’t start saying, well, I’m going to charge you X amount an hour, blah, blah, blah.

00:48:58:17 – 00:49:17:03
Henno Heitur
And they just said, you know what, I’m going to track my time. And I said, how’s that sound? How about we just start with that? I’m going to track all my time that I put into this, and we could talk about it when it’s done. And they’re just like, that sounds good. I like okay. And I’m going to get I’m going to get paid for this, and it’ll be the first time I actually probably make some real money recording, which is awesome.

00:49:17:15 – 00:49:36:08
Agent Palmer
It’s about time. Like I and I say that as someone like, you know, I mean, obviously this is, you know, this podcast is a is a passion project for me. Just and it’s hard to bring money into passion projects. And I know that sounds odd because you know, a lot of us would like to do these things for full time.

00:49:36:08 – 00:49:50:11
Agent Palmer
But you know, money A changes things and B it it is that, well, yeah, I’m not making anything. But I also don’t have to think about it either. And that’s a relief for some of us it is.

00:49:50:13 – 00:50:13:20
Henno Heitur
Well, because guess what? If I’m not getting paid, I’m not putting that pressure on myself for this fucking kick drum to sound right. You know, like like I can’t let you down. I’m doing it for free. Well, let me give you an example. Most of the the intros that I’ve done for podcasts, even though it might take me a long time to finally come up with the idea, because it’s usually something that some, some of them just instantly make sense to me right away.

00:50:13:20 – 00:50:35:11
Henno Heitur
It’s boom, divine inspiration, just boom. It comes together. But sometimes I have to let it marinate for a while. I have to think of, you know, something that just grabs me. There’s an idea, Melody, but I’ve gotten to the point now where once I have the inspiration, when I sit down at my desk, grab the guitar, grab the bass, grab the loops, whatever it is, record everything.

00:50:35:11 – 00:51:03:13
Henno Heitur
And we’re talking 30s to about a minute of material. Yep, the next morning, waking up and making any tweaks, mixing it, it typically takes me. It’s I’ve got it down to about five hours of work, of legit work, about three hours at night to record all the tracks, and about two hours the next day to mix it, listen to it on my headphones, make some changes, go out to the car, listen on the car, make some changes, then send it off right.

00:51:03:17 – 00:51:16:36
Henno Heitur
If I charge 50 bucks an hour, that’s $250. Would you pay $250 for a 30 to 1 minute intro for your podcast? I mean, I think when you don’t make any money on your podcast, I mean, that’s the.

00:51:16:38 – 00:51:21:04
Agent Palmer
That’s the key. I think I would if I could, you know, one of those things. But no.

00:51:21:04 – 00:51:24:23
Henno Heitur
You go on to Fiverr and you see who’s going to give you something for five bucks.

00:51:24:29 – 00:51:38:27
Agent Palmer
That’s true from from Ukraine. I do want to ask, though, of the three hours recording in the two hours, tweaking is what I’ll call it because it’s it’s a lot of different things. Right. Which do you enjoy more?

00:51:38:32 – 00:52:01:56
Henno Heitur
I probably enjoy the recording more than the mixing, which is why this album will ended up being mixed by somebody else. Okay, but most of that is because of my own inferiority complex on it, or just my insecurities about other people listening to it. And then it’s funny to feel like someone’s going to judge me based on how it sounds.

00:52:02:05 – 00:52:30:23
Henno Heitur
But the difference here is with this album and with the things I do for podcasts and with my own stuff, nobody’s going to compare it. That’s why when it comes back down to around the idea of mastering and loudness levels and all that kind of stuff, not put I mean, yeah, we’re going to put the stuff up for streaming and it’s going to a CD is going to be made and all that, but it’s not like it’s going to be listened to side by side with other recordings where someone where we have to we have to compete.

00:52:30:28 – 00:52:31:05
Agent Palmer
Yeah.

00:52:31:10 – 00:52:51:50
Henno Heitur
And the same thing with the podcast. Podcast intro doesn’t compete with any, but anything you don’t listen to, it’s side by side to something else and go, oh, well, you know the quality of that. I don’t like that. So it makes it a lot easier. It’s a lot less stress. It’s more it’s it’s my own hang up. And based on how things are sounding already, I might actually end up doing mixing on this.

00:52:51:50 – 00:53:12:07
Henno Heitur
We’ll see. I’m not sure. At this point I’m amazed at how like, yeah, I’ve already said drum scare the crap out of me and these aren’t scaring the crap out of me and the drummer’s happy, so I’m like, well, shit, because guitars are easy for me. I, I can mix guitars all day long. Vocals are a good singer, I can mix.

00:53:12:11 – 00:53:17:12
Henno Heitur
I’ll tell you the hardest thing for me is, is the stuff that we’re. I’ve sang over.

00:53:17:12 – 00:53:29:24
Agent Palmer
Well, you’re probably I mean, we’re always our own worst critics, but I it’s got to be easier to deal with mixing your own riffs than to mixing your own voice.

00:53:29:24 – 00:53:39:57
Henno Heitur
I at least I’ve gotten over it now where it’s like, that’s one good thing about podcasting. It’s like you get, you get over that, the version to your voice real quick.

00:53:39:58 – 00:53:55:16
Agent Palmer
One episode, that’s all it takes is you’re real. If you’re really going to edit for whatever reason and you have to listen back to raw audio, you get over it real quick. Because if you can’t listen back to your own voice, it’s over.

00:53:55:21 – 00:54:18:48
Henno Heitur
And the thing for me is like, I have a very bland voice when it comes to singing. I’ve always been good at doing harmonies and that kind of stuff. I’ve never been a lead singer. I’ve got some moments, you know, what it is, is my voice is like, every time that you’ve had it, there’s a band that you loved, and the guitar player decided to put out a solo album and you’re like, yeah, the music’s good, but singing is not the same.

00:54:18:53 – 00:54:39:15
Henno Heitur
It’s, you know, lead singers or lead singers have everything that you’ve ever heard about where a lead singer gets into trouble or says something stupid or gets arrested or blah, blah, blah, or, you know, all those things. That’s what makes a great lead singer a great lead singer. It’s they walk in with that attitude and, you know, the backup guy who decides to put out his own album.

00:54:39:15 – 00:55:03:17
Henno Heitur
I mean, sure, sometimes that’s amazing. But for the most part, there’s a reason they were the backup guy. You know, you bring in that talent. And so, like, for myself, like, like Tom, a singer and dog house, he’s got this really neat way of inflect. His inflection is cool and he does things with his voice. And like I put it, I put a microphone up on him and it sounds amazing.

00:55:03:17 – 00:55:28:46
Henno Heitur
And then I sing into it and I go, what is wrong with this microphone? So that’s, you know, bringing this back to one of the questions from the beginning was about like gear and stuff like that. Like it took me so long to realize that, again, it ain’t the equipment. It’s the person that’s in front of it. It’s the making sure you didn’t do anything dumb like have the person standing in a corner where they’re, you know, the sounds bouncing off the walls.

00:55:28:51 – 00:55:50:01
Henno Heitur
The thing that we always hear about with podcast is like, oh, just grab any microphone. You don’t do bull. That’s bullshit. Get a decent fucking microphone. Right. If if your room sounds like it’s an echo chamber, put some freaking curtains up or, or, you know, go on to eBay and get foam remnants and stick them on. You know, there’s things you can do, you know, quality.

00:55:50:01 – 00:56:09:27
Henno Heitur
You know, there’s a basic level of quality. However, with that said, you don’t have to spend all the money. And that’s what I’ve learned. Yeah, I have spent all the money and got a shitty sound before. And with this recording that we’re doing right now, I’ve got some great sounds happening and it’s not the most expensive stuff in the world.

00:56:09:31 – 00:56:39:54
Agent Palmer
So the last, the last remaining vestiges of like, stuff from my late 90s jaunt into audio engineering is I don’t have any of the Porta studios anymore. I have a few guitar amp still. I have one microphone from back then. One. Okay. And it is it the greatest microphone? Absolutely not. But it works. It worked for me in college when I would sing it open mics and stuff.

00:56:39:58 – 00:56:53:04
Agent Palmer
It’s the $10 RadioShack mic. I sure I had a $50. Sure. And you know, at the time I could have told you the difference, but only one has stood the test of time and only one still works.

00:56:53:08 – 00:57:19:38
Henno Heitur
I’ll tell you, there’s, there’s recordings out there today that are being done on 20, $30 RadioShack boundary microphones because, so a boundary microphone is like, imagine like a flat square, and it’s got a cord that goes into it and it uses a perso. And what’s amazing, you can stick it on a wall. Most times what they do is they just stick it inside of a drum set.

00:57:19:43 – 00:57:45:06
Henno Heitur
They put it on the bottom of the drum set, and there’s this one particular RadioShack mic that when you set it up a certain way, gives you the most amazing sound for certain genres of music. And a lot of times what people will do is they will add trashy into the pristine to give it some character. And it’s so like I almost went and bought one of these mikes just because I wanted to.

00:57:45:11 – 00:58:11:07
Henno Heitur
I’m like, okay, I got to find out what the deal is with this $30 RadioShack. Like, you know, and the more I looked at it and it’s like, yeah, just do here’s here’s the one little bit of advice that that I think everyone should should realize this for themselves. I’m never one of those people that I’ll say, don’t go on and make all the mistakes yourself is find some gear that makes you happy and then go do you know?

00:58:11:07 – 00:58:28:05
Henno Heitur
And it took me a long time to get to that point where I’m no longer grass is greener. I got I did have a wish list and I’ve pretty much knocked off the wish list. I have certain bits of equipment that I wanted to have that I’ve always wanted to have, and now that I have it, now it’s time to do.

00:58:28:10 – 00:58:52:09
Henno Heitur
It’s no long and the same thing with my guitar stuff. I don’t have the best, most amazing amplifiers in the world. I’ve got some really nice guitars, but when it comes to amps and stuff like that, you know, I don’t get really fired up about it. It does what it does, what I needed to do. So now I’m going to go do and one of the biggest hang ups I think, and I already, you know, touched on it already is, you know, the grass is always greener syndrome.

00:58:52:14 – 00:59:20:25
Henno Heitur
Eventually you just you just need to, you know, put boot to ass and, you know, make your art happen, whatever it is, and do the best you can with what you got if and then be okay with that. You know, some of the greatest music out there has been done this way. There’s you. If you get into the the the backstories for certain songs, you’ll find out that some of your favorite recordings were done on some of the the most basic, simple equipment.

00:59:20:29 – 00:59:53:51
Henno Heitur
You know, and and you can do that too. And that’s what I’m hoping to do that for myself now I really there’s something happened when my dad passed and I thought about I had a little bit of an existential crisis. Not there was definitely no crisis. But let’s just say as as I was driving home, I was thinking about what I was going to do with the next couple, you know, hopefully a couple decades of my life.

00:59:53:56 – 01:00:14:29
Henno Heitur
And I one of the things that hit me is I’m going to do music. I’m going to keep doing music. It’s the one thing that I love to do. If I won the lottery, I would build a studio and record bands for free all day long. I would love to do that, and I’m going to keep doing music and I’m going to get a little less hung up on the equipment.

01:00:14:33 – 01:00:35:11
Henno Heitur
Sure. Am I going to am I going to try something out? Yeah, of course I will. You know my going to buy something new. Check it out, see what I think about it. Yeah I will, but it’s time to just to do what I love to do and apply those the parts of the process that are fun, like the production aspects, working with others.

01:00:35:16 – 01:00:54:41
Henno Heitur
I’ll tell you, we’ve had some happy accidents. Oh, I love happy accident. That’s why I love art. That’s why I love playing with other people. So I love playing with this group of guys is for those happy accidents. They sure they happen at at one. I’m by myself, but not nearly as much as when I’m interacting, you know, with others.

01:00:54:41 – 01:01:18:36
Henno Heitur
That’s when the the little miracles happen and makes it all worthwhile. I’ll ask you the question that I’ve had to ask myself and get over it. It’s like, what in your life is holding you back? What’s stopping you from doing your creativity or your art, if at all, where you’re thinking about doing it and you’re not doing it?

01:01:18:45 – 01:01:46:04
Agent Palmer
So there’s nothing stopping me from writing. And, you know, one of the things I made sure of when I launched this podcast was that I would still have time and energy and like the mental resources to be able to continue writing, because that was something I wasn’t willing to give up even for a podcast. The podcast has kind of opened me up to, I can do this, and it’s another outlet and it’s another medium.

01:01:46:09 – 01:02:09:55
Agent Palmer
I keep thinking and it’s, I don’t know, serendipitous, you know, the universe talking to me, whatever. I’ve been thinking about what other mediums there are for me. There’s nothing stopping me right now, right? I’ve got the blog and I’m happy with what I’m outputting there. I’ve got some people behind the scenes who keep telling me to write, maybe more fiction, or maybe get back into poetry.

01:02:09:55 – 01:02:26:45
Agent Palmer
And I’ve started to think about it. I’ve started to jot down maybe a verse here, or like the outline for a short story. And my platform of the blog has never been just about movies or just about this. So I have a platform where if I write a verse, I can put it there. If I write a poem, I can put it there.

01:02:26:45 – 01:02:49:04
Agent Palmer
If I write a short story, I can put it there. And the podcast has been another additional wonderful outlet. I did a video relating to a short story using stills, but I used some movement in all the still photography to make it look like a video behind a narration that Dan Lisette did for me of that short story.

01:02:49:09 – 01:03:11:19
Agent Palmer
One of my guiltiest pleasures, if you will, is I enjoy editing. You know, I don’t know, you know, you and I have been recording for like an hour and 40 minutes as I talk right now, the time on the episode when it gets released will probably not be 140 minutes at this point, but I really enjoy that editing process.

01:03:11:30 – 01:03:35:27
Agent Palmer
And when I did the one video that I’ve done, I really enjoyed that process too. I just don’t know what that next step is, and it’s probably beyond me. It’s probably, hey, do you have a script? Hey, would you like to shoot this thing? Hey, whatever. Like it? That’s probably where it’s more than the blog and it’s more than the podcast where it’s not something I can just do myself.

01:03:35:32 – 01:04:09:45
Agent Palmer
But I do want to strive for more because it’s a challenge. And it’s kind of what you we’re talking about in terms of what did you want to do? There’s nothing stopping me except that I know where my limitations are. So if I want to start doing more video, I can’t do it on my own. But if I’d never went any further into video, I think what I’ve established for myself on the platform of the written word and the spoken word is definitely creatively fulfilling to a point where as long as I keep doing it, I’ll be fulfilled.

01:04:09:49 – 01:04:32:04
Henno Heitur
In a lot of ways, the asking you this question was is kind of a dumb question, because you are one of the few people that I know that has you write, you do the writing, you do the writing because you want to do the writing. I’ve never heard you say that something is holding you back from writing. There’s no insecurity about it.

01:04:32:04 – 01:04:51:09
Henno Heitur
It’s not other people’s opinions. It’s not how many people read it. You just write. You do it. It’s one of the few things that most people don’t even get around to. They want to write the book, but they’re not willing to write something just every day. And you’re one of the few people that does that with that’s your art.

01:04:51:09 – 01:05:08:52
Henno Heitur
Is that writing? And now you’ve taken it to the podcasting two? It took a while, but you’re doing it. But there wasn’t a hang up in that regard. It wasn’t like, oh, well, when I get this or when I do this, then I’ll make it happen. It was just a matter of, you know, when it felt right you were going to do it.

01:05:09:06 – 01:05:35:29
Henno Heitur
And I think one of the reasons I asked this is, is, you know, is there some other is that next step, you know, you you all have already done more than most people ever do when it comes to something that’s enjoyable. That is like a passion. You know, most people just stay in the the I wish stage, you know, and they never just put the pencil down to paper for just for the sake of doing it.

01:05:35:34 – 01:05:42:37
Henno Heitur
So as a person that has done it, you know, that’s why I was curious. But it’s like, is there, is there a book? Is there something in your future?

01:05:42:40 – 01:06:02:14
Agent Palmer
Yeah, I there could be. I think it all goes back to the podcast where everybody’s like, when, when, when, when. And it wasn’t until I had the idea this is the format. This is what I want to talk about. This is who I want to talk to. This is how I want to do it. You know, I’ll say you’re absolutely correct.

01:06:02:14 – 01:06:27:27
Agent Palmer
Like, I know I could write a book. Do I do I know what that book is going to be? No idea. Right. Jason Zapata and I talked about adaptation and interpretation on this show, I think episode nine. But we also, you know, I helped edit his first book of poetry that we self-published and is available on Amazon, and we’re currently in the process of working on his second book of poetry.

01:06:27:36 – 01:06:52:52
Agent Palmer
And I’ve already done one pass through editing his novel. I think one of the things that holds me back, but also sets me free is I’m also comfortable being the assistant. I’m comfortable being the producer. If I’m just an editor for Jason Zapata, I don’t see that as I’m just an editor. No, it’s it’s his words. Absolutely. But I get to help.

01:06:53:01 – 01:07:14:51
Agent Palmer
And that’s a huge thing. When you talk about wanting to open up a studio and help record bands for free. Look, if money were no object, I would just help produce podcasts. I would just work with people because it’s enjoyable. I enjoy the process in a way similar to you that other people are like, you know, like, oh, I just have to write it.

01:07:14:51 – 01:07:33:07
Agent Palmer
I don’t want to edit. Yeah, I just want to record it. I don’t want to mix it. I don’t know, I mean, that process is just as fun. It’s one of those things that keeps me going. It’s why when people talk about, I mean, we talked about it up in terms of recording, like, anybody can grab a mic.

01:07:33:17 – 01:07:42:51
Agent Palmer
Yes, every anybody can grab a mic. But just because you recorded for an hour doesn’t mean you should release an hour, right? Like do some editing.

01:07:42:55 – 01:08:06:23
Henno Heitur
So so here’s the, here’s this is the fun part about that, that I know you and I just get a kick out of this all the time, which is yeah. Anybody could record. Have you tried fucking dealing with a podcast feed, an RSS feed with iTunes and Spotify? I mean, that’s great. Anybody can record something. You know how fucking technical it is to get the shit out there.

01:08:06:28 – 01:08:18:06
Agent Palmer
I still second listen, the the guilty. The guilty thing for me is I release an episode every fortnight and every. Oh, my.

01:08:18:06 – 01:08:21:38
Henno Heitur
God, did you just use the word fortnight?

01:08:21:43 – 01:08:41:03
Agent Palmer
I mean, technically it’s every two weeks, but a fortnight sounds better now. It gets me. No. What? One of the things about it is, though, that period of time I put so much into making sure that my first one was right. I now compare every new release to the last one. All right. Did I get the title right?

01:08:41:16 – 01:08:54:56
Agent Palmer
Is the description where it’s supposed to be like, I feel like I’ve not learned a thing because, like, I put everything into the one and now I compare it all the one. But there is so much more. It’s not just hit record release. Yeah.

01:08:55:01 – 01:09:25:09
Henno Heitur
But the art part of it is the voice captured. It’s the the pencil on the paper. That’s the part. And there’s typically a lot of walking before you get to the point where you’re going to have some success or you’re going to feel comfortable or confident or whatever it is, but it’s that walking that’s worth it. And the one thing that I’ve admired about you is when you would, like, tell me your schedule of your blogs for like the next X amount of months.

01:09:25:14 – 01:09:35:22
Henno Heitur
There was work that you were ready to do, and it sounds like you take that and apply it to the other aspects of your passions.

01:09:35:27 – 01:09:59:45
Agent Palmer
I do, and it’s so I get occasionally criticized because I treat Agent Palmer the brand as professional. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but I, I treat it like it’s a job because, yeah, I want to be taken seriously. And the only way I can be taken seriously is if I take it seriously. You know, if. Oh, I just put I just threw something together.

01:09:59:45 – 01:10:12:24
Agent Palmer
Here’s 30 words I need to get a post out this week. No, that’s not that’s not fulfilling to me. I don’t want to lie to myself. First and foremost. So you have to do the work. Like I feel like you have to do the work.

01:10:12:24 – 01:10:36:03
Henno Heitur
And act as if that’s what it’s like. Act as if, yep, as if you are getting paid for this. That’s one of the things that my greatest, challenges with anything that I do with my passion projects, like whether it’s getting better at bass or, you know, playing more guitar, doing more, getting into song ideas that I have that I haven’t, you know, completely sussed out is I need to do that.

01:10:36:03 – 01:10:52:20
Henno Heitur
I need to say, okay, on these nights, I’m going to go do my job. Yeah, that’s going to help me a lot. It’s going to help me if it’s if it’s just my hobby and my pastime, well, guess what it’s going to be. It’s the quality level. And the accomplishment level is going to be a hobby or pastime.

01:10:52:25 – 01:11:00:34
Henno Heitur
But if I want to make it where I hope and dream it’s going to go to, it’s only going to happen if I do it like you’re talking about, which is like, treat it like a job.

01:11:00:34 – 01:11:24:20
Agent Palmer
There’s a discipline level that I’m comfortable with, but I cultivated it, you know, I’m not I’m, you know, it would be a lie to tell you, like, oh, no, I started the blog and that’s just the way it was. No, no, it it took me a while to get comfortable with it. The only benefit I had when I launched the podcast was I knew what it took to do the blog so I can apply it to more than one thing.

01:11:24:27 – 01:11:45:36
Agent Palmer
But this didn’t happen overnight and it’s fulfilling. Like, and at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing for me. It would be great if 100,000 people listened to this episode. It would be great if 50 people tweeted me about this. But if two people listen, as long as I think I put out a good product now, that’s that’s good enough for me.

01:11:45:49 – 01:12:04:47
Henno Heitur
Yeah, it’s I was talking to Jason, our drummer, one night, and I was telling him about my kind of epiphany on, you know, I’m going to play music. I’m just going to play music because it’s something I love to do. And he looked at me and he said, you know, I needed to hear that because for years and years I keep saying, I’m going to do this until.

01:12:05:02 – 01:12:23:13
Henno Heitur
And I and I gave myself and I did that in my 20s. If I’m not a rock star, by the time I’m 25, then, dun dun dun dun, you know, and we’ve all done this. If my podcast doesn’t reach so many listeners by so-and-so, I’m done or blah blah. And that’s what Jason said he was doing.

01:12:23:13 – 01:12:47:30
Henno Heitur
He’s like, if I don’t, if I’m not making a certain amount of money at music, then then I’m done. And and what he really just told me is like, it’s what I needed to hear is I’m just going to keep doing it, let go of all that stuff. And it was the greatest affirmation that I wasn’t alone, you know, in that follow your passion, regardless of outcome, you know, enjoy the journey, you know, have a great time.

01:12:47:30 – 01:12:49:48
Henno Heitur
It’s what I see you doing. I love it.

01:12:49:48 – 01:13:16:31
Agent Palmer
I don’t think there’s any other way to deal with the passion project. I do not understand. Look, everybody works differently, right? So I’m not going to get on people. But I look at I’ll admit I’m a snob when it comes to this, but I turned my nose down at the the writing November thing challenge people do, because most of those people don’t write the other 11 months of the year.

01:13:16:36 – 01:13:17:22
Henno Heitur
Exactly.

01:13:17:22 – 01:13:31:58
Agent Palmer
And it’s not that I don’t think a prompt in a community for one month is a bad thing, but if you do it one month and the other 11 you don’t, then why even bother doing it for that one month?

01:13:31:58 – 01:13:47:50
Henno Heitur
Yeah, that’s I’m the same way with like my my workouts. I’ve decided that I’m going to do a workout that I know I can do for the next 20 years. And it’s not a it’s not a monthly challenge. It’s not a two week challenge. It’s not a one week. I can’t sustain that stuff for the rest of my life.

01:13:47:55 – 01:14:09:57
Henno Heitur
It’s a wonderful booster. It’s a wonderful get back into it kind of a thing sometimes or, you know, set a little goal for yourself. I don’t need to push myself to the next limit. I want to be able to to do something that’s sustainable, whether it’s, you know, an eating plan, an exercise plan, a passion project, something like that.

01:14:10:07 – 01:14:37:24
Henno Heitur
There’s been too much, you know, I’ve already touched on it with you. The grass is always greener and the all or nothing attitude has got me nothing. I mean, it really has. It’s it’s amazing how there’s a reason that I have been playing with the same musicians now and for long periods of time over the last ten years, is because I started to appreciate the journey and quit and get out of these outcomes.

01:14:37:29 – 01:14:55:57
Henno Heitur
I kept trying to control the outcome. What did it get me? It got me a lot of outcomes, but none of them were great, you know? And now I get to have the the wonderful and I get to make up for all those wrongs. That’s how I look at it. So yeah, that’s my ego got me into so many bands, you know, like, oh, I was in all these bands.

01:14:55:57 – 01:14:59:15
Henno Heitur
No, I was kicked out of a lot of bands.

01:14:59:20 – 01:15:30:21
Agent Palmer
I think I and I think it also goes back to if you don’t enjoy the process, you’re not going to get any fulfillment out of the end result anyway. It’s like, you know what? I don’t care how good you are if you don’t enjoy the process. It’s it’s one of the things where athletes who enjoy the off season are usually the ones who last the longest in whatever their respective sport is, because if you don’t enjoy putting the time in, then you’re resenting putting the time in.

01:15:30:34 – 01:15:32:38
Agent Palmer
And that’s that’s that’s no way to go.

01:15:32:43 – 01:15:41:07
Henno Heitur
Or is it all about just the results, you know, is it all about how you look? Is it all because god damn some of those people put in, I get there.

01:15:41:21 – 01:16:00:31
Agent Palmer
I don’t think it can be all about results because it it goes back to like my schedule, right? Like, how did you beat there’s been a bunch of people on this show that I’ve talked to before. This show was a thing that I shared my schedule with and they’re like, what the. But everybody, everybody looks at what I accomplish.

01:16:00:35 – 01:16:20:08
Agent Palmer
Well, I don’t accomplish that without the schedule and without the discipline to come home from an eight hour day when I had a job and still work or record or whatever you have to put in the time, it’s just, you know, that’s the difference, right? I can only keep putting in the time because I enjoy the process. Yeah.

01:16:20:08 – 01:16:25:48
Henno Heitur
Otherwise you yeah. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t be if, if at any point it became a burden, you wouldn’t be doing it.

01:16:25:53 – 01:16:26:46
Agent Palmer
Exactly.

01:16:26:51 – 01:16:32:31
Henno Heitur
As basically it is true. Yeah. If it was ever if, if, if it was ever a struggle.

01:16:32:40 – 01:16:44:14
Agent Palmer
Yeah. I mean sometimes it, it is it’s writing. It’s not always, you know, flowing like a river, but you get through it. And I also know that there are going to be good times and bad times.

01:16:44:14 – 01:17:02:31
Henno Heitur
So see, that’s the thing I think this is what it’s about is like you’ve you’re doing one of the things that what I like to view or how I like to approach things too, is to not, you know, realize that there’s going to be ups, there’s going to be downs, there’s going to be product of times. There’s going to be not productive times.

01:17:02:31 – 01:17:23:02
Henno Heitur
There’s going to be days you don’t want to be doing. There’s going to be days that you’re going to be wanting to do it, but you just keep doing it. Yeah, you just keep doing it because something about it made you love doing it. It’s the one thing where I just let myself down when I was younger is I didn’t realize that it’s worth putting in the time.

01:17:23:02 – 01:17:46:18
Henno Heitur
It’s worth getting through the hard parts. It’s worth the fresh. Like right now. I’ll catch myself like we’re trying to get gigs booked for this for the summer, and there’s certain band members that don’t respond in time. And then Tom loses the opportunity to have a gig. And my first reaction is, is like, fuck, fuck these guys. You know, they’re, you know, and I’m like, oh yeah, so-and-so’s got two kids.

01:17:46:18 – 01:18:03:54
Henno Heitur
The other guy’s got three kids, you know? Oh, and he runs a business to and he plays in two other bands. It’s like, how about accepting the fact that, well, that’s just the way it is and enjoy it. What you got. Yeah. Because the younger me would have been like this ain’t worth it. They’re not putting in the hours, you know, that kind of bullshit.

01:18:03:59 – 01:18:17:47
Henno Heitur
And it’s so nice to just let go of that. And that’s that’s why I get to keep doing it every week is because I’ve learned to, like, let go that that bullshit that’s so easy to get caught up in.

01:18:17:52 – 01:18:23:16
Henno Heitur
You.

01:18:23:20 – 01:18:44:44
Agent Palmer
I’ll admit, I pulled back the curtain on this episode by telling those of you astute enough to do the quick math that I edited about 40 minutes out of this episode. It was about remastering and music formats, really technical stuff, which I found interesting but not as interesting as the personal turn. The episode took towards the end. That was what I felt was the better story to share.

01:18:44:50 – 01:19:04:44
Agent Palmer
I am, after all, the host, producer and editor, so those are the kind of decisions I’m allowed to make. I’m sure if you reach out to Henno, he’ll regale you with tales of remastered music and formats aplenty. All you have to do is ask. But the reason that that had to go was because of the conversation that dovetailed into passion projects.

01:19:04:49 – 01:19:28:39
Agent Palmer
Henno literally flattered me, though I think I was more flattered listening back during the edit than during the recording. I am a professional, after all, because I am doing all of this Palmer stuff for myself. I don’t mind that I don’t get much recognition, but also I don’t get much recognition, so it’s not often I’m aware that people notice the totality of the work that I do.

01:19:28:44 – 01:19:52:32
Agent Palmer
But as there’s been a common theme during many of the episodes of this podcast, you have to put in the work. Great pieces of art require work. It’s artwork. A podcast requires work, an album, a book, a blog, a career change. Whatever it is you want to do, go and do it. But you have to put in the work.

01:19:52:37 – 01:20:12:38
Agent Palmer
I applaud Henno for understanding and breaking through paralysis by analysis. I myself have suffered from that at times and I know many other friends who are similarly afflicted. But when you get through it and the thing gets done, that’s an amazing feeling. It’s a feeling that if you are listening to this right now, I wish for you to have.

01:20:12:44 – 01:20:36:42
Agent Palmer
So stop fretting and go do. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll learn, you’ll get better. But most importantly, you’ll be doing, not thinking about doing, but actually doing. And so long as you enjoy the process, the journey, then the end result will be fulfilling. Thanks for listening to The Palmer Files episode 14. As a reminder, all links are available in the show notes.

01:20:36:42 – 01:20:57:34
Agent Palmer
And now for the official business. The Palmer Files releases every two weeks on Tuesdays. If you’re still listening, I encourage you to join in the discussion. You can tweet the podcast at The Palmer Files. Myself at Agent Palmer, and reach this week’s guest, Henno at either Henno. You can hear him on the Moving the Needle and Crazy Life podcast wherever you are listening to this.

01:20:57:43 – 01:21:16:07
Agent Palmer
And don’t forget you can see all of my writings on Agent palmer.com. The show email is the Palmer files at gmail.com. If you want to share with me what you’re working on, or if you have any feedback on a previous episode, or if there’s a topic or guest you’d like me to consider. You can also hear more of me in the meantime on our liner notes.

01:21:16:07 – 01:21:32:40
Agent Palmer
A musical conversation podcast with host Chris Maier and my other gig as co-host of the podcast digest with Dan Lizette?

01:21:32:45 – 01:21:46:57
Unknown
You need.

01:21:47:01 – 01:21:53:24
Unknown
To.

01:21:53:29 – 01:22:05:08
Unknown
Be.

01:22:05:12 – 01:22:07:46
Henno Heitur
Yeah. When are you gonna get rid of the pink curtains?

01:22:07:51 – 01:22:14:14
Agent Palmer
Okay, so when Steph moved in, she said she was going to get rid of them. And she’s been here for over a year now, and they’re still here.

–End Transcript–

This transcription was processed by PalmerTech 3.1 and may contain errors for HUMINT (human intelligence).