Transcription
This is the fundamentals of mixing lesson one. This is, um, I don't know how many lessons this is going to be. Type of course, I'm going to keep going until I reach some kind of an end, so we'll see where it ends up. But this is lesson one, and this is a part of the first series, which I'm calling kind of the mixing and sound side of all of this, and that's what we're going to focus on for the first few lessons here.
The one subject that I wanted to get into—in looking for a title, I found it very difficult—is: Why is mixing so difficult? Of all the elements of engineering, I think the things that end up frustrating engineers of all kinds the most, in terms of the degree of difficulty, is mixing. It's interesting that throughout the history of recording and making music, the recording engineer was always the most important of any of the engineers in the process. During the days where records were cut directly to vinyl, that was the first and last stage because if they cut the lacquer poorly, then the band would have to record again.
It wasn't until the late 40s when analog tapes started coming into the recording process that a secondary stage of engineering entered in. However, it was up to the recording engineer to place the musicians in the studio as they saw fit. If they had multiple microphones, they were responsible for mixing them in real-time while the musicians were performing. So, responding to what you think somebody's going to do is a very unique skill. I've done some of this, and it's a lot of fun, but it's nerve-wracking.
You know, people who do live sound get this, and in most cases, the live sound engineer finds it most challenging with artists they haven't worked with before. Once they've worked with an artist, they know what to expect and can compensate accordingly. They get a feel for working with that particular artist, but that was where it was most difficult. They were mixing people live literally right to vinyl and then eventually to tape, which created the job of the transfer engineer. That was somebody who smoked cigarettes and read the newspaper, putting their feet up on the desk while the tape was transferring to a lacquer on a cutting lathe.
Eventually, as multitrack recording came in, the job of the mix engineer started to become more important. As multitrack technology increased and track counts increased, the mix engineer position became increasingly complicated and more difficult to do. The more difficult part of engineering was actually mixing, where tracking engineers could get away with a lot more because they could rerecord things. They could lay out individual elements of a drum kit on different tracks, so the balances of the kick and snare were not as important in the tracking process, as long as they were recorded cleanly without distortion.
This took a lot of pressure off of the tracking engineer's side of things. Overdubbing was about doing it again. If you missed a punch, you would record again over that section, which became less pressure for tracking engineers. However, the mix engineer's position became that final stage, pre-mastering, where you would be able to assemble the song.
I think what is most limiting to working in this style of processing relates to elements that are really out of the mix engineer's control. Most of this goes back to the technology we use for listening to audio. If you don't understand the history of stereo, it's kind of interesting. Most people, if you do a little history search on stereo, will find that stereo was created in 1948. In terms of commercially released music, it probably didn't come out on vinyl for people to actually purchase and listen to until the 1960s.
However, what happened was that the earliest stereo technologies were created by Bell Labs, dating back to the 1920s. When they conducted their research on creating stereo, what they realized was that the best configuration for creating a stereo mix was to actually have three speakers. There would be a center channel speaker added to the left and right channels. Initially, this technology was created more for the film industry.
Interestingly, the very first surround film made goes all the way back to Fantasia in the late 20s. The newer venues, movie theaters, actually had surround systems built into them, but it wasn't until nearly a couple of decades later that studios or theaters began to have surround systems.
In the technology, what they found worked best for stereo was having a left, center, and right channel. They found that the phantom imaging in the center created too many problems. If you're not familiar with phantom stereo or phantom imaging, it means that if the same signal is fed from two speakers simultaneously, it seems to be in the middle but slightly phase-shifted or comb-filtered.
This is because the signal from the right speaker is also received by the left ear with a delay, and the signal from the left speaker is received by the right ear with a delay. That subtle delay creates a comb filtering effect, making the center image a little fuzzier. Having a center speaker solidifies or anchors that. If you pan something to the center and feed it only to the center speaker, if you move your chair over to the left, nothing would move along with you.
However, with our current stereo systems, this is the case, and thus, the process of creating stereo evolved. Originally, all record releases were mono up until the early 1960s, although stereo recordings were being made. Consumers didn't have stereo technology, and you could do surround recordings, but if nobody has a surround system to listen to, then it’s basically a dead format. Nobody ends up using it. This is sort of what happened in the late 1990s with the SACD format and the DVD audio format, which had surround capabilities, but the timing of that just happened to be dreadful, and it didn't really take off.
Not in the surround aspect, although SACD is still taken in by a lot of people who are real audiophiles. Now, what makes mixing so difficult is not so much the tools and the ways they are used, because those can be technically explained. In this course or this series of lessons, we are going to go through a lot of those techniques. The difficulty comes in the actual consumer technology itself.
The way we experience audio is always an immersive experience. From the time we're born through our entire life, unless we strap headphones on, it's an immersive experience. We hear audio in terms of the spectrum of the space that we're in, whether it's a room or outdoors. The sound envelops us; it comes from every direction. The mental programming of our brain in terms of how it connects to our hearing is inextricably connected. It has been programmed over and over, infinitely, so it can't not be deprogrammed.
Anything you do in a mix, you have to consider this programming. The more you understand it—which I will discuss in the mixing process—the more effective and productive decisions you can make when you actually get to the mixing step-by-step process.
Now, here's the biggest limitation: when we look at speaker systems, there's a huge variation. We have everything from headphones, including earbuds, up to high-quality headphones that cost several thousand dollars, to speaker systems ranging from tiny speakers in iPhones and small media players, tablets and iPads, to laptop speaker systems, desktop computer speakers, and full stereo systems. There are also audio systems that transmit into surround systems or televisions, car stereos, and so on.
The possibilities—the frequency spectrum characteristics, the dynamic response characteristics, the distortion characteristics—completely cover the whole map of range of possibilities. I think the biggest problem that people face in mixing is that the one thing they focus on most often is frequency response. Interestingly enough, the frequency response that translates to nearly every speaker system and helps things move is nowhere near the areas where people have the most problems.
It's not to say that frequency characteristics aren't important; I will explain them more when we get into what you should look at and how you should listen in order to make things translate effectively from one speaker system to another.
One of the issues here, one of the other many issues associated with this, is all the different listening environments. Every listening environment is going to affect tonally and structurally, depending on how vibrant or alive the space is. You have people who have heavy curtains, thick carpets, and big couches in their space; then you have people with open spaces that have tiled floors and very little furniture, creating much more reflective spaces.
The variety on the acoustic end becomes troublesome. So you're fighting through that and the translation of that kick in, the fact that just having Fletcher Munson curves means that the listening volume of the person is going to vary in each space and environment. This has a major effect on what is going on. Not to mention altitude, which refers to the density of the air and has a huge effect. As you go to higher altitude—say, a mile high or 1.6 kilometers up—all of a sudden, the low-frequency response dissipates much more rapidly, while high-frequency response travels better. You go down to sea level, and the high-frequency response gets dampened significantly, while the low-frequency response becomes more solid.
So you have all these things; not to even consider that each listener's hearing will have qualitative differences. Some people may have severe damage or moderate forms of damage, and for the most part, they will adapt to systems and purchase systems that meet the characteristics that seem to fit the way they're hearing. If they lost a lot of high-end, they might listen to very bright systems.
I once bought a set of earbuds for my wife to connect to her phone so she could listen to music. I put them on, and it felt like someone was jabbing two knives into my head. I quickly threw them off, and she listened to them, saying, "Oh, I love them; they're perfect!" I thought, "Oh my god, this is trouble."
Over the years in professional studios, I have been infinitely fascinated by listening to music. If I went out with friends, to a bar, or a club, or even into a clothing store playing music, I would notice how people set up their stereo systems and how they listened to music. I studied that stuff carefully because I wanted to understand how little people know about audio. Many people think, "Okay, there's sound coming out; that's good enough for me." Some people may be more particular—maybe they tune into specific things, but for the most part, you have to be sensitive to how people listen to music.
Don't get involved in it or put yourself in those situations; otherwise, you'll end up repairing everybody's stereo system. What you want to do is notice the way that people listen and be very conscious of that because it will inform you about how to approach mixing and what makes things work.
In this, we have a lot of limitations. Whenever you have some sort of engineering exercise—whatever it is—you want to make a car that can travel effectively on any surface. It can drive on grass, asphalt, wet surfaces, dry surfaces, rocky surfaces, and off-road, even run on water and climb mountains. What ends up happening in the process of making something that would work effectively like that is sometimes you create something that doesn’t work well in any situation.
In approaching music and mixing, you sometimes have to limit how you approach a particular mix based on the style of music and how listeners are actually engaging with that style. What we have today is a much more headphone-driven user base than we've ever had. A lot of people are listening to music through headphones and earbuds, and that has become much bigger than it has ever been in the past.
Also, many people listen through media players, iPads, and computer speakers—smaller speaker systems. Fewer people have big stereo systems, and more have subwoofer systems and things like that. Anything you can learn about how people listen to music is essential.
For example, if you're mixing a classical or jazz record, it's likely that listeners of those styles are spending more money on their stereo systems and are looking for fidelity and higher audio quality. Therefore, a more high-fidelity approach ends up being better when working with these listeners. They are likely to be in quieter environments; even if they're in a car, if someone has a lot of money, they're more likely to be in a car that provides better acoustic isolation from outside noise.
When you're dealing with people primarily monitoring through iPads and earbuds, that user base will predominantly be in noisier environments, which requires more compression and characteristics that bring dynamics out in a louder way. The loudness, in that case, really matters to ensure that the low-level information is above the general noise floor that the average person would expect.
There are some balances within all of this, and I will get to the characteristics that translate from system to system, which is going to be an important aspect of all this.
I only want to touch on one more thing before moving on to the next lesson: the art in limitation. Every medium has its limitations. We talked about the limitations on the receiving end. I think one of the things that makes mixing interesting and difficult today is not that we are limited in options, but that we have way too many options. This is sort of the dilemma of working in the DAW era: there's a blessing part of it, which is that you can stack up thousands of plugins and have all these different colors.
Now you have a crayon box that has ten thousand colors instead of one with just three, but that doesn't mean you will necessarily create a better painting or a better picture. It's interesting that every art form we appreciate—be it paintings, photography, graphic design, or music—has its limitations. In a way, our creativity is sparked more effectively by limitations, and I think that's really important in mixing records.
Primarily, in the 1980s through the 1990s in professional studios, every studio, believe it or not, had limitations. I might be mixing on some amazing SSL console or Neve desk, and while there may be a good selection of outboard gear, there's still a limited amount of it. I had to be very selective in how I worked. If I was mixing on some vintage Neve desk, there would be limited frequencies—I wouldn't have access to every frequency, only the stepped ones provided.
Then, I would rely on outboard EQs to get any additional frequencies I couldn't access in-between what I truly wanted. This forced me to be more creative and effectively make those things work. Limitations have actually, in some ways, helped to create character.
Music is amazing like this. It always has been for years. Songwriters were limited to the instruments they could play and their ability to sing. For example, if you had an acoustic guitar and wanted to write a song, you would need to focus on the lyrics, the melody, melodic development, movement, chord structure, and adjusting your dynamics.
Artists were forced to focus on those performance aspects to bring their ideas to life. Today, similar to mixing, one of the problems is that there are so many options. Any songwriter, if they can play a keyboard, can effectively play any instrument ever created and lay it into a song. This creates too many possibilities, which can lead to a sort of laziness in terms of the process.
This is an important thing I want to discuss, and it will be part of the fundamental approach to mixing. You don’t want to restrict everything you do, but there are certain confinements or boundaries you need to set for yourself. When you pursue a certain sound, it's essential to stay focused on that and not wander all over the place. There's integrity and importance in that focus that I really want to emphasize.
Alright, so this is the least drawing or demonstration of the other classes. I wanted to start off with this lesson because I think it's important to understand what you're feeding into in terms of the mixing process and the approach you take. You have to understand what it is that you're feeding into as well as you possibly can before you start making decisions in your mix and production process so that you get the most effective results. I'm going to continue that in lesson number two.