Last time we looked at the awesome musicians helping me take my record to the Junos. Today: Mixing!
We’re mixing my album now, maybe even as you read this. It’s a lot of staring at the wall between the speakers, listening intently to everything. There is a bit of a trick: focus on one thing at a time. Listen to how the vocals sound compared to everything else. Make some small tweaks. Listen to how the other instruments sound. Tweak. Rinse. Repeat. And repeat again. Mixing can be the world’s biggest rabbit hole: as they say, a mix is never finished, simply abandoned!
Mixing… it’s basically what the word says. It’s a little like baking a cake: you adjust all the ingredients so they work together, so things are clear, and above all, make the singer sound GREAT!
A good mix can be a thing of beauty. In fact it should be. I’m sure there are almost as many approaches to mixing as there are mixing engineers. I’ll stick to the basics and the most common methods.
Once again… Equalizers
One of the first and most effective tools in mixing is something you’ve seen here before: equalizers. As I said before (see my blog post), EQ is where you adjust specific frequencies up and down. (i.e. louder & quieter). Instruments, including voices, overlap each other in their sound, in their frequency ranges, and that can hide a lot of detail. A main job of EQ is taking out any sound you don’t want, like the boominess that an acoustic guitar produces. IRL this big bass sound, especially in a dreadnought guitar like mine, is good. On a recording? Not so much. It sounds like a woof in the low end and makes everything sound mushy. Plus it can overshadow higher frequencies, reducing clarity and detail.
Voices need a little boominess taken out too. Then, bass guitars and drums share a bunch of low-frequency sounds, so you need to carve out a little space frequency-wise so our ears can detect the differences twixt them. After this, moving up in the frequency spectrum, electric guitars share a whole bunch of tones with vocals, and did I mention the vocals are the most important part? So a good engineer cuts some sounds from the guitar, while still keeping all the music. It’s an art. We’re talking miniscule, almost inaudible changes, yet they matter. Our ears are always listening, 24/7, and they’re good at detecting fake and not right, and they hear these subtle changes, even if we’re not consciously aware of them.
Chances are that your favourite songs are all really well mixed. You don’t get very far in this business with murky hard-to-hear songs.
Our old pal Compression
Compression is a big part of mixing. Compression in music is making loud sounds quieter and quiet sounds louder. I covered this in my blog. Compression can also affect the sound, not only the loudness. As things get squashed by compression our ears hear them differently. Sometimes this is desirable, a nice, subtle effect.
Time-based Effects
Depth… Space and “air” sound really nice in a song. A good mixer works in 3D: they give us the illusion of width, height, and depth to a recording. Time-based effects such as reverb, echo, delay, etc. play a big role here. Listen to Van Morrison’s isolated vocals on Brown Eyed Girl. You can hear some reverb-like stuff on his voice. I think it’s an old-school plate reverb, not sure. Plate reverb is a sheet of metal in a box that gets vibrated by a speaker and then pickups read the vibrations of the plate, much like the way an electric guitar works, and it produces a really cool reverb effect. It also sounds to me like Van has, perhaps, some echo happening, plus maybe a flanger effect, providing that kind of swirling, whooshing sound. What do you hear? Please let me know!
The big thing: Volume
Here’s where height comes in… Perhaps the most effective tool in mixing is adjusting the volume. (Again, see my blog post on mixing boards.) Of course, the vocal is usually top of the heap. It doesn’t take much added volume to make a track stand out. Sometimes 3dB up or down, the smallest volume change our ears typically can detect, can make a big difference. Sometimes changes as small as 1dB work!
Also, especially in today’s “in the box” computer recording, volume can be automated so thangs go up and down at various times in a track. You may want that searing guitar solo to really stand out… bring it up a bit in the mix, at the end bring it back down. BITD there could be several people sitting at the Mixing Board, each with their own few sliders to move, waiting for the exact spot where they change the volume of something. Now the computer takes care of that for you.
Another big thing: Panning
Width: One huge aspect of volume is adjusting the left/right balance, the same way you do on your stereo. It’s called panning, from panorama. This is how instruments get placed across the stage, again giving you a nice “picture” while also keeping clarity and detail.
Next send: Marketing My Music! (Hoowee, that’s a big job!)
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BTW: if you have questions about all this, or questions about other aspects of producing an album, or questions about anything JML, please send them. I’ll give you a shout-out if I use your question as a post topic, and I’ll endeavour to answer all questions, either in a post or via DM/email. You can reach me through this email or on Instagram @JohnMichaelLindmusic
Thanks for being my fan!
John