Joey Sturgis on strings, tracking, and production headaches
Producer & Mixer · Reviewed by the Change Your Strings editorial team ·
Who Joey Sturgis is
Joey Sturgis is one of the formative producers of modern metalcore. Of Mice & Men, Asking Alexandria, The Devil Wears Prada, Emmure, We Came as Romans, Born of Osiris — much of the 2008 to 2014 metalcore catalog was tracked at his Foundation Recording Studio in Connersville, Indiana. He is also the co-founder of Joey Sturgis Tones (plug-ins) and GetGood Drums (drum samples, with Adam "Nolly" Getgood), making him one of the most influential voices in current-generation metal production both behind the board and through the software the rest of the industry uses.
For the long-form coverage of his production identity, see the full Joey Sturgis producer profile.
Why these quotes matter
Sturgis on gear vs craft
The two quotes above frame two different production-economics realities. The first is operational: working studios go through strings the way restaurants go through olive oil. The second is craft: bass tone is a consequence of pitch accuracy and edit discipline, not a selection of strings or amps. Both reads have direct implications for how a tracking engineer should think about bass-string longevity, intonation tools, and the upstream-vs-downstream allocation of session time.
What's not on this page (yet)
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.
This is consistent with our sourcing posture: documented quotes only, with URL + date + publication.
Related
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.
Producer & Mixer
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.
Producer & Mixer