Joey Sturgis on strings, tracking, and production headaches
Producer & Mixer · Reviewed by the Change Your Strings editorial team ·
Joey Sturgis is one of the formative producers of modern metalcore, Of Mice & Men, Asking Alexandria, The Devil Wears Prada, Emmure, and one of the most influential voices in current-generation metal production through his plugin company, Joey Sturgis Tones.
The two quotes above come from text-accessible primary sources: Atoragon's Guitar Nerding Blog (2016) and a Gearspace forum thread (2011). Neither is endorsement-tied.
A widely-circulated quote attributing "change bass strings every song when recording" to Sturgis appears in summaries across guitar forums and gear sites. We could not locate a verbatim, URL-cited primary source for it in publicly-indexed text. It may exist in his paywalled CreativeLive Studio Pass course or in un-transcribed podcast audio. We'll add it when a citation surfaces. Until then, it isn't on this page.
Related
- Joey Sturgis's producer page, full production context.
- How often to change strings, recording-cadence section.
Sturgis asked in a 2016 Atoragon interview whether he had any gear endorsements. Strings made the list, not as a tone preference, but as a recurring consumable cost of running a working studio at the volume he was tracking metalcore records.
“No, but I wish I had some companies behind me. I would really like drum heads, strings, and guitars. Those are the things that are always giving me a fucking headache.”
Sturgis on a Gearspace thread discussing his bass processing approach, the claim that tone is a downstream problem once intonation and editing are solved. Fresh strings are the enabling condition for both.
“Some notes can have a higher RMS value and become louder in sections where it shouldn't. You have to monitor or listen for these situations. The big deal breaker with bass is intonation and editing. If you nail those two things, the tone is easy to create.”