Part 14 - Arts and Crafts: Mixing <> Production <> Writing

 OK, so we've written the song, established the creative vision, recorded all the parts, and deleted half of them. Now we just need to mix it all together. 

Easy right?

Guess what, I've got another book recommendation for you... The companion to Recording Secrets is Mike Senior's Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio.

Now I'm obviously not going to attempt to summarise an entire book / career into a blog post, but for the purposes of finishing our songs, here are a few suggestions about approaches.

Lo Fidelity

I'll start with a mistake I made when I first started to think about my recording and mixing in a more detailed way than 'stick a mic in front of it and plug it into the 4-track. The mistake I made was in chasing fidelity. I reasoned that if I wanted to create a recording that sounded like a bunch of real instruments then I should start by making each instrument sound as much like the real thing as possible. Then mixing should just be a case of setting the volume levels and everything will be fine right? I mean, that's what happens when you listen to a live, unamplified band right?

Unfortunately not. Not right.

For a whole bunch of technical reasons that include the recording medium, the playback mechanism, and the way the human ear and brain work, it is not so simple*. 

You have to consider how the sounds work together as a whole. And just as I suggested stripping stuff out of your arrangement, you will need to do something similar with the frequencies of the actual sounds** you're mixing.

Tools and tips

We're not going to get into deep detail here (read the book!) but here are two tools and two tips that might quickly help clean up your track and make it sound noticeably better.

Tool 1: High- and Low-cut filters (also known as low- and high-pass filters respectively). A high cut (or low pass) filter will reduce high frequencies, and vice versa.

Why are these important? Because when you record something with a microphone it picks up everything that it's capable of, including a whole load of stuff our brains automatically filter out in the real world (but we notice on recordings). Most instruments don't have a lot of useful low frequency content, but the microphone doesn't know that, it will pick up background rumbles and hums as well as any excess boominess from the instrument (or a less than perfect mic position). For anything that isn't the lead instrument you can low-cut an awful lot away from the bottom end without it impacting the overall sound (and it makes much more space for your actual bass instruments to play in.

You can do a similar (but somewhat less obvious) job with the high cut filter. Again focus on the supporting instruments first.

Find these in your DAW and have a play with them, ideally with some kind of visual representation so you can see what's happening as well as hear it.

Tool 2: EQ. This is a massive subject so I'm just going to give two general tips. 

Cut the low mids. Just as we can use a low-cut filter to clear out boom and rumble, we can use an EQ dip at around 300-500Hz to clear out mush and mud. As we add our various instruments together this is a particular area that is sensitive to an over build-up of energy. Exercising some cuts in this area can really help with the clarity of your mix.

The other thing to try is for your lead parts, typically vocals, a bit of a boost around 1-2kHz. Don't go overboard on this, it can be addictive, but used in moderation it can really draw the ear to the important stuff.

Right enough on tools, that's a rabbit hole that can be the absolute enemy of finishing anything so we'll quickly move on to a couple of tips. Tips, not rules.

Tip 1: turn something down before you turn something else up. If you have two sounds fighting in the same frequency area, and they both need to be there, and you can hear one over the other, it's often the temptation to turn up the quiet sound. Our brains are wired to think louder = better so this initially seems rewarding. But it can quickly turn into a situation where everything is getting turned up and you start clipping and distorting stuff and / or you find you've got no headroom left for your vocal to sit in. So balancing things by turning down is often the better starting point. After all, if you end up with a mix that is nicely balanced but a bit quiet, you can just turn the whole thing up.

Tip 2: if in doubt, cut it out. This is sort of a repeat of the 'delete delete delete' advice from last time but more focused on getting a working mix. You might have a part that has made it through the arrangement cut but when you're trying to mix it it's either stomping on other stuff or is practically inaudible. Cut it out. Remove it. Excise it. At this point, if it is not absolutely critical to the song, it's just getting in the way of you finishing.

Cut it out; no-one else will notice. ;)

Artist vs Artisan

We've talked previously about the multiple hats we wear when trying to release our own music so this is a suitable moment to talk about two different mindsets that we need to jump between during this process.

Writing and composing are creative acts. We start with nothing and out of a process of magic we come up with something. To do that we have to be experimental, open-minded and generally receptive to the idea of 'what if?'

This is our artistic self at work.

When we've moved on to the mixing part of the process though, we have a different job to do. Here we are applying our skills and experience to something that already exists and needs to be fettled into its best state. There are creative elements to this, but there are also engineering and scientific principles at play. We are acting as craftsmen to support that artistic vision.

This is our artisan self, and it requires a slightly different set of skills and approaches.

If you want to delve into this side of things more deeply, Rick Rubin talks about this a lot in his book The Creative Act, another recommended read.

In an ideal world we would have a nice separation between these two stages of the process. But for most of us I suspect the waters are much muddier.

Because I am a songwriter (rather than a composer) I  often find myself jumping between these artist and artisan roles as I go through the creation process. Cutting out a part here (artisan) means there is some space there, so the artist is called forth again to come up with something creative. This then needs to be slotted into the mix so back and forth we go.

In reality there's probably not much we can do about this (other than become better composers and producers), but we can become more aware of when we are in these different states and look at how we choose to apply our time and energy.

If you're feeling under the influence of the muse, but the only job on this song is some technical tweakery, go do something else! Start a new song, or come up with something new for another project. Because the time will come when you are feeling artistically stale but can still have the energy to apply your craft to the project.

We talked about space and permission right back at the beginning; this is another opportunity to give yourself permission to play to your strengths in that moment.

This has been a very, very light touch look at mixing just to help us get finished. If you want to learn more there are oodles of resources out there. If you have no interest in this side of things, the good news is that there are loads of people who are and who will happily do this job for you, priced on a sliding scale of practically-nothing to deposit-on-a-house.

Next time we'll look at working with other people and the finalising and distribution process.

* Unless you're just recording a solo instrument in a nice room. 

** As an aside, applying the same principles can make a big difference to live band sound as well.