SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA: Hello, folks! It’s the peak of summer in San Diego. Yep — our hottest temperatures are not in July! They’re at the end of August/start of September. A great time to snorkel through cool ocean waves, mixing with leopard sharks, stingrays and shovelnose guitarfish (yes, that’s a real fish!).
Or you could mix some real guitars!
We’ve talked about my experience recording someone else. Recently I also had a few opportunities to mix someone else’s music — music I wasn’t involved in making at all. This is a great way to practice mixing; your ego isn’t involved in the individual tracks, only the final result. But it also brings a strong sense of responsibility. You want each contributor to sound their best and feel that the song shows off their talents.
There are a lot of ways to approach mixing a track. One professional mixing engineer recommends that you start with the drums and bass — get those to the right levels, then add the next most fundamental instrument (usually guitar), then vocals, then accent instruments, one at a time until you have a good balance between them. Another engineer suggests adding everything at once! He twiddles knobs until the relative loudnesses of the instruments sound good. One doesn’t add any effects (like reverberation or echo) until she’s totally done with the balance. Yet another likes to pan instruments (move them to one side or another in your headphones) very early in the process. There are a lot of acceptable priority orders for the basic tasks of mixing, which might include removing stray noise from a track, balancing the volumes, panning instruments, adding effects, and correcting problems, just to name a few.
When musicians are recording in their living rooms with whatever equipment they can afford, the engineer spends a lot of time cleaning up the recordings. I cut out stray noises and compensated for crappy mics with filters and EQ (“equalization” — this lets you alter the volume of individual sonic frequencies). I used a few tricks, including EQ and distortion, to make poorly recorded guitars sound “thicker” and less tinny. Because these musicians recorded in different environments, some of them had loud, strong recordings that needed taming, and others had faint sounds that needed beefing up. Some sounded squeaky and some growly. I worked to balance between these things so that each instrument sounded the best it could under the circumstances. (And let’s be honest — a few musicians and singers needed a little bit of help from “pitch correction” to help them sound on key and in tune.)
When I had a mix I was happy with, I sent it to the participants to see what they might want changed. Sometimes, a musician will tell me they can’t hear themselves, or that they’d like more reverb. Not being able to hear yourself doesn’t always mean the volume is too low — there might be too many instruments in that part of the sonic spectrum, so that it’s hard to pick individual instruments apart. For example, if a tenor vocal, a tenor sax, and a guitar player are all playing notes in the same octave, they can start to sound like a single instrument. I can fix this by separating their “EQ curves” so they each peak in a slightly different spot on the spectrum. And almost everyone wants a little reverb. Reverberation acts like smudging on a pencil drawing, helping blur out little imperfections. But too much, and the music will sound muddy and indistinct. So it has to be handled with care.
I’m no professional! But the challenge of making friends’ good music sound even better is a fun one. And hopefully I’ve given you a bit of an idea what goes into making the music you’re listening to.
