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INSIDE TRACK Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: Jake Sinclair & Claudius Mittendorfer What do you get if you cross Frank Sinatra and Queen? Producer Jake Sinclair and mixer Claudius Mittendorfer helped Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie find out... PAUL TINGEN size. When drummer Spencer Smith left the involved “playing trombone with old jazz band in April 2015, Urie found himself faced guys for 10 years during my high school hile almost every conceivable with writing and recording a new album as days. I also played guitar since I was seven amalgamation of genres the only remaining band member. Given or eight and then learnt to play keyboards W has been tried in these his Sinatra-meets-Queen vision, his choice and drums. But it was the schooling in postmodern mashup times, eyebrows were of collaborator seems odd at first sight: trombone-playing and reading bass clefs raised when Panic! At The Disco frontman young musician and producer Jake Sinclair is that helped me more than anything in my Brendon Urie declared that the act’s latest best-known for his work with rock and pop musical development.” album, Death Of A Bachelor, blended the acts like Weezer, Fall Out Boy, P!nk, Taylor When he was 18, Sinclair moved to influences of Frank Sinatra and Queen. Swift, Sia and 5 Seconds Of Summer. Charleston, South Carolina, where he The album’s lead singles, ‘Victorious’ and However, Sinclair had worked as was a member of a band called the Films, ‘Hallelujah’, recall the latter band, being engineer, mixer and occasional co-writer whose second album was produced by hyper-intense pop-rock songs framed in on two previous Panic! albums, and so Urie Butch Walker. Sinclair went on to become kitchen-sink production. (Sinatra influences was aware of the producer’s eclectic musical Walker’s engineer and mixer, working on come to the fore later on in the album.) background, which proved a perfect foil major projects by the likes of Weezer, P!nk, Panic! At The Disco began in 2004 as for the outrageous diversity of Death Of Panic! At The Disco, and many more. Sinclair a quartet, but have steadily diminished in A Bachelor. Sinclair’s upbringing, he says, has amassed a wide-ranging credit list, 64 April 2016 / www.soundonsound.com anyone I know, with incredibly accuracy. When you have limitless possibilities like that you can be your own worst enemy, because you have so many options. For this reason it was important to decide on a cohesive direction. The record has ended up being very diverse, but what ties it all together is Brendon’s vocal style and performance.” In The Beginning Were The Words Urie and Sinclair spent several months, off and on, writing songs, before embarking on the actual arranging and recording. Sinclair deliberately chose to do things in this order, in many cases also starting the writing process with lyrics supplied by songwriters like Morgan Kibby (aka White Sea), Sam Hollander and Lauren Pritchard. “We wrote most songs starting Brendon Urie is the only remaining with the lyrics because, in my member of Panic! At The Disco. opinion, melody is Brendon’s strongest suit, and I figured that if we got sent sketches back and forth between our him lyrics to work from we’d end up with two studios. better songs than if we first wrote melodies “I really wanted to separate the writing and then tried to fit words to them. Fall and the production processes. I think we Out Boy also start with lyrics. I co-produced spent perhaps 75 percent of the time on their last album [American Beauty/American songwriting and 25 percent on production. Psycho, 2015], and I thought it was a really A good song is a lot easier to produce than interesting way of working. Starting with a bad song, so making sure the songs were the lyrics also was more in line with the way great makes my job as a producer much songs were written for Sinatra, and I wanted more straightforward. After we spent several to go the whole way in this respect, so our months writing, with me intermittently aim was that every song on the album could being away to work on other projects, like be played with just vocals and a piano, before we later maniacally mangled them with this crazy futuristic stound! And finally, I really wanted Brendon to show off his Jake Sinclair at work with Panic! At The Disco’s vocal prowess, and for that reason I felt that Brendon Urie in his Infrasonic Studio. it would be smart to write and build the producing, mixing, playing bass, keyboards, songs around his voice, rather than the other guitar and singing. In addition to the way round. above-mentioned names, he has worked “The majority of the songs were written with country singer Keith Urban and crooner on the piano at Brendon’s house. Sometimes Harry Connick Jr, and it was Sinclair’s he’d provide the chords, sometimes I would, contribution to Connick’s That Would Be Me but mostly he worked out the melodies, with (2015) that convinced Urie to hire him for me coaching him. Brendon really did all the a Sinatra- and Queen-tinged album... heavy lifting with regards to the writing — it Sinclair elaborates: “Panic! At The wasn’t like he couldn’t do it by himself. Once Disco do a fantastic version of ‘Bohemian an idea we worked on began to take shape, ‘Victorious’ Rhapsody’ live, which shows what we recorded it as an iPhone voice memo. In Written by Brendon Urie, Christopher a fantastically good singer Brendon is. total we wrote maybe 30 to 40 songs that J Baran, Mike Viola, White Sea, Jake Sinclair, Alex DeLeon, Rivers Cuomo. He honestly is the best singer I have ever we recorded as voice memos. After we had Produced by Bendon Urie and worked with, who can do anything with worked out how the song was going to be, Jake Sinclair. his voice, singing lower and higher than he recorded things at his home, and we then www.soundonsound.com / April 2016 65 INSIDE TRACK JAKE SINCLAIR & CLAUDIUS Mittendorfer • PANIC! AT THE DISCO Bachelor Pads Jake Sinclair and Brendon Urie began work on into my system, rather than us having to recut correctly, with me often manually having to Death Of A Bachelor in April 2015. The writing things later. A number of the vocals, guitars nudge things in time. sessions took place in two places: Sinclair’s and drums that he recorded at his own studio “My own studio is a mastering room, which Infrasonic Studio in Los Angeles and at a studio did indeed make it to the album. I am a firm I turned into a production/mix room. The they built in Urie’s LA home especially for believer in the idea that the moment you work equipment is based around a mastering console the purpose. “I found that Brendon is more out how to sing a song, you should make sure made by Sterling, which basically is a big rack comfortable writing at home. He had just you record it that time, because it will never be with a bunch of preamps on the left and a bunch bought a new house with a two-part garage, so the same after that. There’s some kind of ghost of compressors on the right, and in the middle I helped him convert that into a studio. I fitted that disappears when you keep recording. This a tray for my laptop and UAD cards. I used him out with similar mics and signal paths as is the main reason I wanted him to have a good to have a summing rig with the Shadow Hills I have in my studio, in particular a Wunder microphone at his home. mastering compressor and some Pultecs, but in Audio CM7 microphone for his vocals, and “The only thing that complicated things was the end found that I liked working in the box Chandler TG2 and Eric Valentine-designed that he likes working in Logic, and I work in better, if only because of the consistency and Undertone Audio MPDI mic pres. I also Pro Tools. I’ve used Pro Tools since I was 16 and recall ability. I’m often jumping between several recommended that he got a Universal Audio know it inside out, and I find it hard to get my projects at the same time, sometimes working on Apollo 8, in part because it comes with the UAD head around Logic. It’s like a different language up to half a dozen songs per day. For monitoring platform, which I adore, and he bought a pair of to me. So Brendon would export his tracks as I used to have a set of Barefoot MM27s, though ATC SCM25A monitors. audio, and I then imported them, but sometimes I recently got a pair of ATC SCM150ASLs, “The idea was for Brendon to track his I had to ask him to re-export things without which I love. I also have a ’60s Ludwig drum kit vocals, guitars, and drums at his place, which certain plug-in treatments, and there also always in the corner that’s great, and I built an iso room would be of good enough quality for me to load was the problem of tracks not quite lining up for my guitar and bass cabinets.” with Courtney Love and Weezer, we spent “The vocals were all recorded with my bass amp, which is a 1964 Ampeg B15, nearly a month on recording and arranging a Wunder CM7.

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