Remember mixtapes? Like the kind you had to sit and record to a cassette?

Russ tells a story from the past where he did exactly that for record labels to hear new artists.

I mean, I was first engineering, but at a much lower level because it was a lot of demos and stuff. And when I say, I mean I wasn't only engineering, there was other stuff... I mean making pitch tapes for publishing companies was a big deal back then too. Now it's all, people email mp3s, and it's no big deal. But back then you had, a publisher was going to bring a cassette to somebody to try to get the songs cut on an album, and there was, the same way there's a loudness war now, you wanted to record the song as loud as you could on the cassette without it distorting, because if the publishers go... if the producer of the album's going through listening to a bunch of different tapes, you wanted yours to pop a little more. 

So it was recorded a little louder. So in cassette decks, you know, they had a bias on them, and you can record levels, and I mean it was not just a simple play and record. There was some of those studio cassette decks had some control, and you could definitely screw it up. So they didn't have their regular publishing company interns doing it. They had an engineer person, I mean they thought it was worth paying somebody eight bucks an hour to make cassette tapes. And the other thing was putting... you didn't wanna... you want to make sure the song started real close at the beginning so there's a leader at the beginning of every cassette tape, and you wanted the song to start immediately. You didn't want there to be too much space because your fear was always the producer would get frustrated and just pull the thing out and throw it away or whatever. 

So you wanted the song to start immediately but you couldn't clip the beginning of the song because of the leader, and then you want the spacing between the songs to be just right. You wanted them... you didn't want there to be too much space because you didn't want to pull the tape out again, but you didn't want to be too close because if you put them too close a cassette deck that had an automatic search feature on it if you hit fast forward to go to the next song it wouldn't stop at that song because they were too close. So there was an exact spacing between the songs. Yeah, I mean it's sequencing crazy stuff but it was crazy enough to make it where they wanted to hire an engineer to do it.