BE THE MASTER OF YOUR MIX

It’s hard to nail a mix sometimes, but often problems arise when you lean too heavily on chance. We all appreciate it when, as luck would have it, we pick the perfect mic or that awesome reverb at the first attempt. But did we really fluke it, or were we simply too lazy to notice that we’d been influenced by convenience?

Here’s a familiar scenario: you’re working on a mix and you decide that the main vocal needs some sort of delay on it to work in alongside the reverb that’s already in the mix. In this particular case you have a semi-specific thought that the delay in your mind’s eye should be smokey, long and probably fairly invisible to the untrained ear. This idea has been prompted by the pace of the song and the structure of the vocal, which is creating a hole after each line where this delay would naturally land.

So you quickly establish an aux send, feed the vocal into it and dive into your plug-in list, looking for a favourite delay unit (or, if you have a hardware equivalent, you patch that in – assuming it still works!). You plonk this into your insert point and away you go.

But before you can think a little more specifically about the type of delay you’re wanting to build, the vocal triggers the default setting inside the unit and something else pops up in your mix that immediately attracts your attention. This new delay – the one you’ve just chanced upon – sounds cool. It’s a 1/8 ping-pong delay sync’d to your session’s tempo map and somehow it works!

Feeling inspired now, and trusting that this ‘chance encounter’ with an entirely different delay was somehow ‘meant to be’ – maybe it was the stars aligning – you run with this random sound, and the long, smokey delay idea that ‘fitted nicely into the vocal structure’ is sidelined or unconsciously abandoned.

Do you see what just happened here? The idea for the delay that your mind first conceived has been replaced by a chance encounter with a random patch. The original idea was based on a viable, musical thought, the other is a delay plucked from a database onto which you’ve overlayed two concepts: serendipity and mysticism.

When you allow this to happen repeatedly during a mix, you can eventually find yourself boxed into a corner from which you have no ability to escape, and all because you allowed a random collection of ill-considered sonic add-ons to become part of your well-crafted, finely tuned mix.

Luck and craft don’t always go together at all in this caper, despite what you hear in interviews! In most instances, this ‘serendipitous’ approach to effects is simply lazy engineering – the stars have nothing to do with it.

Occasionally, luck has favoured mixes, like Cher’s famous pitch-correction win, often cited in the mix community as an example of a hit made almost by chance. But for every one of these famous wins, there are a million failures that no-one hears about – they’re certainly not written about in magazines or discussed during interviews, that’s for sure!

So to believe that luck always plays a massive role in any great mix is a fundamental distortion of statistics – nonsense, in short.

Now Let’s Add A Reverb

Let’s imagine now that the same type of logic is deployed one hour later during your well-crafted mix when you decide to add a new reverb to the drums, keeping in mind that, at this point, you’re still blissfully unaware of your first abdication of responsibility over the delay choice.

Here you make the same mistake. Though you may have something in mind for the drums – a fairly short but strong room sound perhaps, that might include a gated element to prevent the drums from washing out too much – you instead let the initial reverb patch play immediately on the drum track.

“Wow, that sounds rad!” you once again muse to yourself, and before you know it, the sound you originally conceived in your head has been supplanted with Patch 01 – Large Hall. The new sound is only ‘cool’ during this first encounter because it’s unexpected.

Unexpected sounds naturally catch your ear. It makes no artistic or engineering sense to call this patch ‘magical’ simply because it grabbed your attention. A bomb going off in the street would have the same effect. Should you include that, too?

This style of mix engineering isn’t making good choices. It’s simply your mind being pulled off course by a shiny new object.

So, now your drums are in the mix sporting a big hall reverb that sounded awesome when you first encountered it, and while you may have adjusted the length a bit since to make it fit the song, you’ve nevertheless chosen a reverb based on the same elements of chance, mistaking what is clearly poor mix methodology for serendipity.

More Reverb And Grit

The next thought you have sometime soon after all this bad engineering has gone down is to add more reverb to the voice, because now that’s getting a little lost, thanks to the masking effect of the drum reverb. Surprise, surprise.

You also decide at this point to turn the vocal up a bit to lift it above the cloud of effects, and initially this too seems like a good plan.

The next thing you decide to do is add some more grit to the two electric rhythm guitars that frame the left and right of your stereo image.

These core elements were really well recorded at the time, and during the rough mixes these were the standout feature.

But now they seem a little flat – a bit soft and mellow; somehow lacking the natural focus they once had.

So you decide to reamp them just a smidge, to bring them ‘back into focus’. They’re already on a group bus, so you decide to add a plug-in insert here mostly out of convenience, and when you first add Tubes-R-Us (or some such amp modeller) to that group the guitars are transformed!

“Wow, that sounds crazy!” you once again muse in astonishment.

The two guitars sound nothing like they used to, but wow – they’re definitely dramatic now!

So again you praise the night sky for delivering you this magical encounter with Amp-01, and before making any adjustments to the mix percentage on the plug-in’s UI or investigate the thousands of options it can provide, you put the new guitars back into the mix.

Now your mix has a distinctly different flavour to it, and it’s all feeling a bit aggressive. So you wind back the mix percentage on the Tubes-R-Us plug-in that’s strapped across the group and this has the effect of settling the guitars back down.

But although there’s some disquiet in your mind still about how the guitars now sound, you don’t address this problem immediately because you want to give the ‘chance encounter’ with Amp-01 some time to settle in.

Instead, you now add some Decapitator distortion to the snare, because the drive of the drums now seems a little insipid, and the snare in particular seems to be getting a little lost – its grace notes becoming invisible and that’s making the rhythm of the drums sound a little more like a plodding 2 and 4 beat than a funky groove.

Hijacked and Hoodwinked

By now you can see where this mix illustration is heading, and why. Instead of the engineer being in control of decisions that materially influence the mix, the lazy encounters, the falsely ascribed serendipitous moments, and the disproportionate (some would say, fanciful) value placed on chance essentially hijack the mix process via a series of insidious wrongs perpetrated on the recording.

These are hard to rectify later, particularly if the engineer is convinced that the problems of the mix lie elsewhere, and not with the decisions made earlier. Indeed, without realising it, these earlier ‘choices’ were not engineering decisions at all. They were simply lazy engineering – ‘Tarot Card Technique’, I call it.

Too many mixes follow this same path. Everything starts well – the recordings sound strong, performances epic – but as soon as the first effects are added in this fanciful manner the track can lose its way, washing out like footprints in the sand.

So the next time you’re adding an effect to a mix, think clearly about what you want that effect to achieve before you dive into it – if it’s a reverb or delay in particular, ask things like: what size space should this be, and would that be a place I would have picked to record it? And while you’re establishing the auxiliary send/return chain, mute the output!

Whatever you do, don’t start conflating lazy engineering practices with miraculous encounters. Craft your effects carefully; don’t have them inadvertently handed to you on a platter or you will eventually find yourself in a cloud of unknowing, wondering how your mix ever got so messed up.

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Andy Stewart owns and operates The Mill in Victoria, a world-class production, mixing and mastering facility. He’s happy to respond to any pleas for pro audio help… contact him at: andy@themill.net.au