Danny Kalb (Ben Harper, Beck, Wilco, Jack Johnson)

As house engineer at The Boat, Danny Kalb recorded and mixed music for artists such as Beck, Tortoise, Wilco, Karen O, Jack Johnson, and many others. While working at The Boat he met Ben Harper and they worked on four albums together. Once established as a freelance producer, Danny took on numerous alternative rock projects. In that time, he also established himself as the go-to producer for modern reggae charting with albums from The Green, The Expendables, and others.

Are there any indispensable plugins you think people who self-produce their music should invest in?

I'd say there aren't any. Every DAW comes with very high-quality plugins that producers would've killed for 25 years ago. I don't want to add to the G.A.S (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) of any budding producers, songwriters, or engineers. I've been there, thinking “the quality of my work would be better if I only had X piece of gear”. Yes, I have plenty of plugins I like, but I feel like I could use anything.

More important than anything is having a relatively decent listening environment that translates to the outside world. No room is perfect, but if you can dial in your listening environment and learn it, every step of making music gets easier.

Obviously, this is very important for mixers, but it’s just as important for producers and songwriters. Even if it's not the final mix, a producer or songwriter might be pitching tracks to people, and the mix is the representation of the song. The better it sounds, the more it connects with the listener.

Even in the track-building stage for a producer or songwriter, really bad acoustics will affect all of your musical and arrangement choices.

For example, if your room exaggerates low end and low mids, you will shy away from adding parts in that range. Maybe a song written on the piano would sound perfect with specific lower inversions, but you avoid those because it sounds muddy in your room. Then the piano doesn't complement the vocal as well.

You send your song off to people, and it sounds thin, and the nuance of the vocal is lost because it's fighting with the frequency range of the piano. The listener would never think “oh their room is off and they should just use a different inversion to fill out the low mids which would both give the vocal more clarity but also make it feel heavier”. They just might think: “This is alright, but I don't love it”.

Every musical decision is based on what you're hearing back, and if your room is a funhouse mirror, bad decisions can pile up. It doesn't matter what plugins you own if what you're hearing back is askew.