Taking the decision to follow his instincts has elevated Julian Bunetta to the top rank of contemporary songwriters and producers.
“For a lot of my career, I tended to follow the rules of what you should and shouldn’t do. You set up your busses this way, you find one reverb space, you never have too much on the master bus, and so on. But at a certain point, I threw that rulebook out. Now I’m just splatter‑painting on the canvas. I’m not comparing myself to Picasso, but if I want to, I put the nose on the forehead, because it’s fun. I’m constantly trying to experiment and trying new things. I like to mess stuff up and see what happens and stumble on happy accidents. The only way you can do that is by trying something you haven’t tried before.”
A few years ago, Julian Bunetta also decided throw out the rule book with his career. This led directly to him having writing, engineering, multiple instrument, mixing and production credits on one of last year’s biggest hits, Teddy Swims’ ‘Lose Control’, and now on Sabrina Carpenter’s huge hit ‘Espresso’.
Stop Chasing
The moment that divided his career into a before and an after phase came in 2019. “I’d had a lot of success working with One Direction from 2012 to 2015, and then global hits with Niall Horan and Rudimental. In 2018, I moved from Calabasas near Los Angeles to Nashville, and had three or four number ones with Thomas Rhett and country. Then, in 2019, when my daughter was born, I had to figure out again how to work. I used to be in the studio until 3am, and all of a sudden it was clear I couldn’t do that if I wanted to spend time with my family. And then, obviously, the pandemic hit.
“I didn’t do much Zoom writing, it just isn’t for me. Instead I went back and learned my favourite old songs on the piano — by Babyface, Diane Warren, and so on. I dug into synthesis and how to actually work these plug‑ins that I have. I’m not a gearhead, and I normally just turn some knobs, and either I get a cool sound or I hit the next patch. I wanted to go back to the fundamentals of what I was doing, and why. I wanted to reframe how I worked, and also who I worked with.
Julian Bunetta: "In the songwriting community in LA, you’re working with a different artist every day or every two days, because the more people you work with, the more of your songs are cut."
“I didn’t want to chase things as much any more. In the songwriting community in LA, you’re working with a different artist every day or every two days, because the more people you work with, the more of your songs are cut. But that never worked for me. When someone’s really, really famous, you don’t get as much time in the studio with them. I decided I wanted to do less speed dating, less writing with different people every day. I had done that since I was 19.
“Instead, there was just a slowing down. I wanted to work with friends that I trusted and loved. The thing that I love the most is sitting in a studio with them and hashing out lyrics and hashing out a production and musing over what we should do on the next song. All my success came from working with people I spent a lot of time with, where I really understood who they are, and got their vision. I wanted to work more with new artists, because I found that some of my most enjoyable times were when creating music with artists who were game to do anything, who want to try new stuff, who are hungry.”
A Family Affair
As the sons of well‑known drummer and producer Peter Bunetta (known for his work with the Temptations, Donna Summer, and many other legends), Bunetta junior and his brother Damon grew up among the stars. The brothers and their father later founded a publishing business called Big Family (now under the umbrella of Hipgnosis Songs), which continues to provide the framework for Julian’s career.
“My mission statement during the pandemic became: ‘Who do I really want to work with?’ I said to Damon, who is also my manager, that I wanted to work with people who are interested in working with me, because of the way I like to work. So we set out on a journey to find new people to work with, and help them with their creative process. We found a few artists that I really enjoy working with, and I decided to dedicate all my abilities and focus on them, and not spread myself thin any more.
“Teddy Swims was one of the up‑and‑coming artists we found. I started working with Teddy in 2020. ‘Lose Control’ was written at a songwriting camp in Palm Springs. I love songwriting camps. There are no interruptions, no meetings, no lunch appointments, no family obligations. We do a lot of these camps, and we go somewhere remote with a selective crew of people. We just write and we write, and don’t worry too much.”
‘Lose Control’ bears writing credits for Swims, Joshua Coleman (aka Ammo), Marco Rodriguez‑Diaz Jr (Infamous), John Sudduth (Mikki Ekko) and Julian Bunetta, with the latter and Ammo co‑producing. “That song was based on a rough demo by Ammo. Infamous and he developed it into the three‑time musical bed. The demo was just an MP3 that I dragged into Logic and recorded over. Later, when I got home, I got the stems from him, and then I added more things to the arrangement. The guitar solo was a mouth solo by Ammo that I later played on guitar in my studio in Los Angeles, and we ended up chopping it to half the length.
“Teddy co‑wrote the song, but by the time it came to recording his vocal part, he had lost his voice. So someone else sang the demo. The demo was bare bones, and when I came home, I started producing it up. When Teddy came to my studio in Los Angeles to lay down his vocals, he did a lot of takes to get it right, because he had to adapt to the new production, and make the song his own. He had to unlearn what the other singer had done and get that out of his head. He’d sing it again, and a nuance would happen and I would be like, ‘Oh, that was cool, that was yours. Let’s do it again and build on that.’ We tried out many different things, and the magic started to happen.”
On Song
Bunetta’s credits on ‘Lose Control’ also include drums, bass, guitar, keyboards and vocal production. While some of the instrumental parts are programmed, and Bunetta is comfortable with the modern in‑the‑box, click‑in‑the‑notes approach, he likes to play actual instruments. “Because my dad was a drummer and producer, I went to the studio after school, and grew up there. I’d do my homework and witnessed session after session, with camaraderie and laughter. It was an environment that I gravitated towards and loved. It was my secret place that no‑one else knew. It was a sacred space. There was always a drum set in the house, and I simply knew how I’d play drums when I was old enough. I never learned. My dad fostered all my musical inclinations, and I played in jazz bands and orchestras and Summer bands and so on.
Julian Bunetta has been playing drums since he was a child and frequently plays on records he produces.
“When I was in high school, in 1997‑98, I was doing demos for songwriters in LA that were my dad’s peer group, people like Tom Snow, Cynthia Weil and Andy Goldmark, who had had hits in the ’70s and ’80s, and were looking for someone to update their production. They were recording just piano/vocal to cassette tapes. That obviously wasn’t going to cut it, so I would produce these songs in Logic, and initially I’d hire a background singer or a guitar player, but then I’d play things myself. If you’re given $350 to do a production, you don’t want to give away $200 to an instrumentalist. This is where I started also playing bass, guitars and keyboards.
“When I was 19, I enrolled at the Berklee College of Music, as a jazz drummer. After a year, Warner Chappell offered me a publishing deal. I left school, and spent the next 10 years or 11 years cutting my teeth, learning the craft of writing songs. Before that, I had been more into producing. I loved hip‑hop, and wanted to make beats like Dr Dre and Timbaland. But I then did the grind of songwriting with tons of different people. I really fell in love with writing lyrics and I started singing, so I could write melodies. The things that kept me up at night were not the guitar sound or the reverb or the mix, it was the lyric in the chorus or the melody. So my focus really shifted to the song. At the same time I was still engineering, mixing and producing.
“I was doing well, but the songs that I was involved in writing did not become singles, and when they did, they did not become hits. My brother and I had met this young kid named John Ryan, and in 2010 he joined our company. The chemistry John and I have unlocked everything. He was obviously the missing component. Around this time I was asked to work as a producer for The X Factor, and this led to an A&R asking me to write for One Direction. He paired me with Jamie Scott from the UK, and I brought in John Ryan. John and I ended up being involved in the writing of three songs on the Take Me Home album [2012].
Julian Bunetta: "Around this time I was asked to work as a producer for The X Factor, and this led to an A&R asking me to write for One Direction."
“When the next One Direction album came around, the label flew us out to England to write for Midnight Memories [2013]. Magic stars aligned, and we wrote all the singles and the title track of the album, including ‘Story Of My Life’ and ‘You And I’. It was one of those magic moments. We also did 10 songs on the Four album [2014] and nine on the Made In The AM album [2015]. After that I did songs with Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Rudimental, Thomas Rhett, and others, and I moved to Nashville and got married.”
Home From Home
In addition to his studio in Calabasas, called the Perch, he also set up a studio in Nashville, called the Nest. The latter is a huge space, with a kitchen at one end, a sitting area and various keyboards and guitars in the middle, and the studio gear and a drum kit at the other end. It’s set up for live playing, says Bunetta. “When I worked in Nashville in 2019 and 2020, I learned a lot from working with Dan Huff and other country producers and musicians. Moving here reintroduced me to five musicians sitting in a room and playing together, and watching a song go to unexpected places that I never would have gone to if I was by myself in my studio. After doing a lot of the country sessions, I wanted to incorporate that more into pop. I am a musician, I come from that, and I wanted to find a world where you fuse that with programming. So you don’t just have a 100‑bar loop, but there are ebbs and flows and dynamics.
Bunetta’s studio in Calabasas is called the Perch.
“My studio is above a garage. It’s perfect, because I have everything in one. The guy who’s been mastering all my stuff for the last 10 years, Nathan Dantzler at the Hit Lab, helped me design the room and get the treatments. I have the PMC MB2S XBD monitors here, the super big ones with the cabinet, and they’re great. They’re too big for the Perch, and because John has PMC 8‑2s in his studio in LA, I’m thinking of having the 8‑2s fitted in the Perch, and here as well, so that my two studios and John’s studio have the same monitors.
“I started with Logic and Pro Tools in ’98, but the problem was that the latter was terrible with MIDI at the time. I didn’t have microphones and stuff in my bedroom when I was 17, so I had to do everything with samples. The EXS24 sampler changed the game. I went fully Logic, and I’m still very happy with it. I use it with the UAD Apollo 8XP interface, which we have in all our studios, for consistency. We apply the same philosophy with the mics. I have a Lewitt LCT 1040 tube/FET condenser microphone here, and the LCT 940 in LA. When I go to writing camps I bring Aston Spirits, because they sound great. I bring two in case something happens to one, and sometimes we have two rooms. The mics go straight into the Apollo. I don’t go through anything else because, again, I need to make sure that if we start something in a writing camp, or in Nashville, and then end up in LA to finish it, it sounds the same. So the easiest thing is just to go directly into the Apollo 8XP.
Much of the equipment from the Perch is replicated at Bunetta’s second studio, the Nest, in Nashville.
“I have Hofner and Bacchus bass guitars, and the Kala acoustic‑electric U‑Bass, which is one of these little rubber‑string guitars. You can make it sound like an upright bass, or like a Motown bass. They’re amazing. I record them DI.
“I have several keyboards here, including an M‑Audio MIDI controller in front of me, and the Roland Juno and Jupiter. In LA I have the Sequential Oberheim OB6. But I’m not really a synth guy. When I’m in the middle of writing, I just need speed. I don’t want to stop the flow to try to get a synth sound. And until I find a synth that I can operate super quickly, I just stick to my go‑to VSTs, like Xfer Serum, Spectrasonics Keyscape and Omnisphere, NI Kontakt, and so on. I’ve used them all. Sometimes I try new ones, to get me out of a habit. When I’ve used something for too long, I stop being creative with it.
Julian Bunetta: I’m reckless with plug‑ins. I just pile plug‑ins on and twist and mess them up and move the order of them, to see what it does.
“Plug‑ins that I like to use include the Valhallas, which are obviously a standard. I also love the UAD EMT 140 and the new Soundtoys SuperPlate. The FabFilter stuff is so good, and I like the iZotope Trash, as it pushes things forward. I also use the Logic native plug‑ins a lot. I’m reckless with plug‑ins. I just pile plug‑ins on and twist and mess them up and move the order of them, to see what it does. I don’t set up my sessions with dedicated sends to a big room and a small room and a short delay and a long delay. It’s more fun when I just throw something on.
“Being reckless yields unpredictable results, and sometimes it’s great and sometimes it sounds like a mess. It’s the same with my master bus. It’s different every time. Sometimes it’s just a FabFilter Pro‑L 2. I use iZotope Ozone 10 a lot. The Imager is amazing, and the multiband compression is great. Sometimes I go crazy. There are some records where it’s OTT, with Ozone and then SketchCassette II and then another Ozone and then a Pro‑L 2. It depends.
“Nine times out of 10, I know I need to pass a mix to Serban Ghenea or Josh Gudwin, because they’re going to squeeze something out of it that I’m not going to. But there are some very rare cases when I know that a mix is just right, and there’s no need to go further. You’re going to end up asking the mixer, ‘Can you make it sound like my rough mix?’ I hate that, and they probably hate it, too. What’s the point? In any case, Jeff is an amazing mixer. And at 41, I trust in my ears and my own judgment.”
Enough, clearly, to help create major hits with the rule book gathering dust in the bin.