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Jero Romero is an Argentinian Music Producer, Composer and Mixer who does his best to take care of the songs. The tireless search to transmute music into new worlds makes him do what he does, but always taking care of the essence of what the artist wants to tell.
Photo by Diego Hómez
I think I'm proud of most of the things I've released, each one of those was a step towards a sound that I'm still developing and trying to discover. The trial and error in my life is a fundamental piece to learn and all the projects have given me something. That said, at a result level, the entire project Alan Sutton y las criaturitas de la ansiedad has been a place where I was able to develop as a producer and mixer. The latest releases feel that I have been able to find a way of sounding from music production.
Mi forma verdadera by Rocio Cravero (Prod & mix) and Louvre (Mix) by Santi Muk are two tracks that I also feel like I was able to find a way to tell aurally, although everything is changing day by day.
And there is a band of which I was a FAN, Todo Aparenta Normal, which opened the doors for me to produce the album El ultimo abrazo analogico, I love that album.
Mainly I consider myself a producer, and over time I realized that my way of working has Artist Developer overtones, I still have to learn when it's one role or the other! It can be said that I am not someone who leaves things adrift, I like to be aware of everything that happens in a song and to be able to have a very clear vision of where the track is going to end.
The communication between artist and producer is the most important thing in these cases, within producing there is not only music and sound. Learning to relate to each other and reaching port together is just as important.
The song rules... but not at the cost of having a good time.
I started as a musician, one day I was at a friend of mine and his brother (a drummer) started playing his drums in his rehearsal room. The sound of live drums in that rehearsal room was generating something in my body, a sensation in my chest that was addictive, something that embraced me (I recently discovered that it is the 70hz frequency) from that moment, wanting to feel that again, I immediately began to study drums, love at first sight. This lasted several years until I finished singing and playing the guitar and finally producing and mixing. I studied music production at the EMC here in Buenos Aires and at the same time I studied particularly with other teachers. My first memory listening to music is ''Nowhere Man'' by The Beatles, my father always consumed a lot of music from the 60's / 70's and after a certain age I started to explore all the other decades by myself! In my teens I had a super 80's glam rock stage and then I met Jeff Buckley and the 90's. I think the hardest thing to maintain nowadays, dedicating yourself to this, is a healthy way of listening recreationally and not for work. I found myself falling in love with Japanese music as Joe Hisaishi which is totally different from what I work for and it's a breather!
I think what has influenced me the most was my environment, the people I've surrounded myself with. We have a WhatsApp group with fourteen friends, mixers and mastering engineers which is a constant back and forth around our work, we ask for opinions and we are all the time helping us to reach the best possible result. And during my training I met Jorge Chikiar, my great teacher and it can be said that my musical idiosyncrasy was totally affected and shaped by him, I thank him daily for his teachings and I couldn't be happier to have come across someone like that in the road.
I think that the feeling of frustration is something constant in the search, in the field of music production where one always wants to reach an ''X'' result, one has to be bumping into limits all the time and doing everything possible to overcome them. Sometimes one manages to overcome them and other times not. I think I wouldn't change anything about the process and I wouldn't have done anything differently. Making something sound the way I imagine it makes me go through the greatest frustrations, but when it's done, it's an indescribable feeling.
I have a Stam U47 that I currently use for all my recordings, I only have that mic and I'm used to it by now. The monitors in my studio, some Adam S3H that I find beautiful and my mate that I depend on to start the day.
I learned to produce in Pro tools so there are some plugins that I cannot miss. Instruments from Arturia, Keyscape/Omnisphere, XO from XLN, and Trigger 2 from Slate are all plugins I need to have on hand. And of course a guitar, a pencil and a sheet.
I still have a LOT to learn. What I can say for sure is that you have to put a lot of effort into anything you love, working hard is likely to bring positive results. Try to stay open, listen to the people around you and surround yourself with people who challenge you and make you find yourself on a daily basis, the beautiful thing about making music is that it is constantly changing and always renewing itself, open yourself to any possibility you can make this whole trip much more enjoyable. Oh… and always try to have the best possible monitoring.
There are two instances where I use headphones, the first is when I'm in another studio, having a headset that I can rely on to make decisions in places I don't know has become vital, working with something I know and can take with me.
And the second is during mixes, I like to have another place to listen and review things, making decisions about spatiality becomes easier for me.
The Audeze LCD-X affected my way of working from two different points of view.
The level of detail in the highs and the detail in the time domain is wonderful. Things that I had been editing for weeks like modifying the musician's interpretation or cleaning noises became very obvious at the moment that I put the headphones on, from a producer's perspective it allowed me to understand and see more clearly what I had to address and then when it was time to listen to it on the speakers it was as if nothing had changed but everything was more open. The same happens with mix corrections, you can trust that any movement will translate as it should! They can be used as main monitoring without a doubt.
Another thing that changed is that I have three other colleagues who have these headphones and we work a lot together, for a while it was always online because we wanted to be on our own environments, having this tool allowed us to go and meet each other and still being able to make decisions and work knowing where were standing and that what we are listening to is something that we are used to.
Soon I'm going to be dismantling my studio and I'm going to be without a workspace for almost 6 months, but I'm not worried at all having the LCD-X... I imagine myself working only with the Audeze and I am very confident with how the final product will end up sounding.
All this year I have been working on the album of my band of which I am the producer and member! The headphones arrived just for the final stage of editing and the beginning of the mix, so it was super ideal to have them in this instance... so far they gave me a hyperrealism about what I had already been working on that surprised me and it helped me to give the final touches. It's a very complex record, all played but with a modern/contemporary production style! Lots of detail, lots of channels, lots of fun! The band is called Alan Sutton y las criaturitas de la ansiedad! I’m super pumped to work on some new song and see how these headphones will affect the final result!
Photo by Diego Hómez
