You know some days when you mix, everything just feels right? You're own creativity seems to be leading you to the right EQ, compression and effect decisions, without ever overthinking anything or loosing perspective. On the contrary, we all have those days where we can't seem to grab the right sounds, we're constantly unsure of our settings and mixing becomes a chore, not the joy it should be. Think about those days where you're on top of your game. I bet they're the days, for whatever reason, that you don't have to do much editing, patching or , and you spend the majority of the the balancing and most importantly, listening. Maybe that day can be every day, so long as you spend some time at the start of the day getting things in shape... let's have a look.
Sound engineering is a weird game. There aren't many jobs like it, that's for sure. You spend the day constantly switching between using the left and right lobes of your brain, all whilst listening intently with both in order to make technical and creative decisions. It can be fatiguing and without proper management, you may end up with less than satisfactory results. Take a painter, for example. The painter begins a painting and will spend the majority of their time using the right, creative side of their brain until their painting is done. There are exceptions of course, some painters like to draw grids and paint methodically, but my point is that the painter wastes little energy on switching lobes and uses it creatively in their painting. An accountant on the other hand, spends most of their day using the left, logical side of their brain. Mathematics requires little creative thought and as a result the accountant has more brain energy to focus on the task at hand than if he were to stop and do something creative every ten minutes.
The sound engineer spends the day balancing that fine line of artist and accountant and potentially doesn't draw a very good picture or get a very good tax return. The following paragraph describes a sound engineer diving into a mix as they usually would. The sentences typed in red indicated time spend using the left side of the brain, and the blue the right.
The engineer pulls up the the fader for the overhead microphones and then balances the kick drum with the overheads with their eyes closed, listening to the music. The engineer decides the phase relationship between the kick drum and overheads is not satisfactory and begins to align tracks in the DAW. The engineer rebalances the kick drum and brings in the snare drum to a satisfying level. The engineer decides the kick drum now needs some equalisation and patches in an equaliser, thinking about the inputs and outputs required and following the logical signal path. Listening for what suits the style of music, the engineer applies some equaliser settings.
As you can see, the engineer has already made many swaps between creative and logical thinking, and they haven't even pulled a drum sound yet. Imagine how much more efficient this process would have been if a few things had been taken care of before the engineer began balancing, namely an EQ already patched over most channels and all phase relationships checked. The solution, as far as I can see is to arrange your day so that you can spend a significant amount of time using one side of your brain, and limit the amount of swapping required.
So, I will take you through how I like to mix a typical pop or rock tune for minimal energy loss and maximum time spent mixing like an artist.
1. Organise the session (if you are working from a DAW): Left Brain
I begin working by having a listen to each track in solo. At this point I can check if anything has been labeled incorrectly or not the way I am used to and fix it if so. I'm also making mental notes about what a track might need applied down the line.
With all the tracks labeled correctly, I begin to check the phase relationships between things like close drum mics and overheads, and guitar amps that have been mic'd with two mics. First I might try simply flipping the phase on the close mics to see if it yields a better result, or I may have to zoom right in and manually line up transients. After a while you get pretty good at hearing when phase is a problem.
Now that all your tracks combine well, do a save-as, you never know when you might want to go back to this point! I often insert a simple, low CPU using EQ on every track at this point. It will be useful for when you want to filter out the low-end of guitars and vocals later down the line. If it's appropriate, I do any editing between vocal lines and between tom hits at this point. This is an important one. If you're going to do it, do it now, because I can guarantee it wont be very much fun when you're writing automation and setting EQs and compressors to decide you need to sit there editing for an hour before you continue!
The last thing to do is sort out your routing in the session. If you use drum masters etc, set up, label and rout your auxiliaries and busses and while you're at it, set up a few plug in send effects like reverbs and delays. Life will be a better place to be in three hours time if you decide you want a bit of delay on the vocal and all it takes is turning up a fader and playing with some settings.
Save-as and let's move on...
2. Patching: Left Brain
Remember when we were listening to the tracks in the session earlier? Hopefully you were making (mental or physical) notes about the sounds and what they might need... 'That kick drum is weak as piss, but my Pultec is great for fixing sounds like that', 'The snare drum is fine but needs a little top end, the 1073 plug-in will be fine for that'. Great! You've passed. If you don't remember having any of these thoughts, then strait back to the start, don't pass go. Anyone who owns some recording gear, weather it be hardware or software, knows it intimately. If they don't, then they've got more gear than sense and it's time to slow up the spending and mix a bit more often. You build up a bank in your memory of the times your gear has worked for specific sounds and after a while you get very good at guessing which particular processor will be just right for your sound. This is where you put it in to practice.
Patch that Pultec across the kick drum, insert that 1073 across the snare, and do the same for the rest of the tracks that you can already ascertain need a helping hand across the polished mix finish line. Set all of your processors so that their parameters are flat and bypass all of your units. Now when you go to give the kick drum a bit of thump in an hour's time with your Pultec, you just need to hit the bypass switch and start playing. If you hadn't performed this step earlier, you would immediately snap back into your left brain whilst you think about which points on the patchbay to use and where the signal is going.
Now I'm not suggesting for a minute that you'll be able to predict exactly what plugins and processors you will need to apply to your sounds later in the mix, but you're cutting out as many brain state switches as you can. You will undoubtedly have to patch something in later, or decide that what you guessed would work doesn't, but we've minimised switches.
3. Get mixing!
Your tracks are in phase, everything's edited, you've got reverbs and delays set up and you've got processing ready to apply when you need it. All that's left to do is start balancing and enjoy it. You'll spend the rest of the day (hopefully) in mostly you're right brain and you should be able to stick at it longer and achieve better results. Take a break every 15-20 minutes and just walk out into the hall or something, it'll give you hours more mixing stamina.
While you're at it, try a couple of things for me.
1. Mix with your eyes closed as much as you can. It's like a magnifying glass for your ears!
2. If you mix with a mixing console or a control surface, move your computer screens away from in front of you're face and put them somewhere off to the side. I don't know why but you'll hear better.
'Til next time,
Nick
NF Audio
www.nfaudio.com
nick@nfaudio.com
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