Former MACHINE HEAD/SOULFLY Guitarist LOGAN MADER Talks About His Career As Producer

Elash On Tour recently conducted an interview with guitarist-turned-producer Logan Mader (MACHINE HEAD, SOULFLY, DEVILDRIVER, GOJIRA, CAVALERA CONSPIRACY). You can now watch the chat below.

In a recent interview with Hollywood Music Magazine, Mader was asked what a band can expect when it is working with him. "They can expect nothing but the best," Logan laughed. "I do all my own engineering, all my recording, editing, mixing and mastering. So they can expect high quality of performance across the board with all aspects of recording based on what I do and you can tell what I do. Another thing you can expect is that I don't try and make a band sound like me in the production. I like to make a band sound good, but like themselves, and I think I do a pretty good job of that because when I listen to different projects I don't hear a common thread of similarities through all of them. I don't try to attempt to just put my stamp on something; I try to go freestyle when I am working with sounds, or what the song feels is necessary, I let the music tell me what to do."

Regarding his take on where the music industry is headed, Logan said, "I'm starting to shy away from the traditional record label thing in some ways and I'm trying to look at some other ways to go. There's other ways to do it. You're probably not going to sell very many CDs, but people are always going to want to see live music and want to buy merchandise. There are companies like Red Bull who are doing a lot of creative investment into music and they're not a record label but they have tons of money. More money than any record label does right now. There's interesting new ways to evolve with the changing industry, the dying industry, and instead of just surviving and extracting blood from dinosaurs that have been bled to death find new ways and find new blood."

On the topic of where the music industry will be when all the hands are played out. Logan said, "Well, I think the giants are going to come crashing down eventually or they are going to morph into something other than the traditional distribution warehouse, CD marketing, music sales and content sales. I think it really depends on the future of physical content and I kind of suspect that big companies are going to lean towards membership-driven streaming music to where you don't possess the MP3 or CD. You get to be a member which gets you a login code, so you can listen to their entire catalog or whatever they let you listen to, whenever you want. But you don't get to have possession of it. I mean, that's one way to stop piracy but I really don't like that idea too much. I don't see how it can work yet, maybe someone is working on it, and I kind of get the sense that someone is. I heard Apple might be trying to buy Pandora, which started out as a pirate site and then became so big that they made deals with all the copyright owners and now it's a big platform. But I'm sure CDs will be obsolete soon, and DVD players will be gone and all your music will be played from a device either hand held or on your computer. I don't know where it's all going to go but I think that artists need to think about new ways to generate revenues that don't necessarily have anything to do with selling their music. Build up a community and artists can really do a lot on their own. If they are really motivated they can make shit happen. Like an unknown band getting a big placement on a TV show or something like that can happen for an unsigned band. That coupled with a really good feeling of community online. A good fan base, a good database and a community that follows them the bigger it gets is a valuable asset to have. You can sell ad space and become sponsored to make your money and do your music. You will get your money from Coca-Cola and Red Bull instead of a record label. And then touring: if you're good enough you will make money. The music will go on and on and on and there will always be good artists coming in and old ones dying but how it monetizes in the future nobody really knows. It's an interesting time, kind of revolutionary."

(Thanks: Carl Alvarez)