Happy Monday!
I am guessing most of you don’t know Hawksley Workman. He’s Canada’s answer to the question, “What if Prince and Bowie had a baby?”. He plays everything, sings, composes, engineers, sometimes records entire songs in a single day, veering all over the map musically. Is it cabaret? Is it alternative? Is it noise? Only Ryan Corrigan (his real name) knows for sure.
Two Hawksley videos, and both are so worth a watch.
The first... early in his career, shot in one take and a Juno Award winner: Jealous of Your Cigarette. This is the best use of two and a half minutes ever.
And this, from a few years ago: Young and Wasted. Another simple idea, beautifully executed. What a melody, and what a voice to sing it.
Just one more - live mayhem in a studio. Teenage Cats. When I grow up I want to not care what anyone thinks as much as this guy.
After that 'Young and Wasted' song I feel like crying and missing my past. Oh well, onward...
Puff Puff Fun and Tips
We usually have a few specific use cases in mind when we design plugins. Like the Amplified Instrument Processor: it’s designed to go on electric guitar buses. But then it winds up on vocals, reverb returns, the master, all sorts of applications beyond its original scope.
Of course, this is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Plugins should add to your creativity and spark ideas. It’s never a bad thing to think, “How would this sound if I did this with it?"
We get a lot of new uses from you all, and here are two that I think are especially useful applications of the Puff Puff mixPass.
#1 Puff to Even Out Levels
Frase is a producer, composer, singer, engineer, bassist, multi-instrumentalist. A Canadian, like Hawksley.
Frase performs live and it’s a blend of DJ’ing and live singers, dancers, and players, with backing tracks served up by Ableton.
What’s been a problem for Frase is that he’s using material recorded across several years, mixed and mastered in different studios, and loudness is inconsistent because of different amounts of limiting and compression. Adjusting level doesn’t really work, and adding additional compression is a non-starter.
Frase’s solution: he runs the individual tracks through individual instances of the Puff Puff mixPass and then matches loudness by ear. Because the Puff Puff isn’t a compressor or limiter, the actual meter levels don’t really change, but the apparent loudness does. Once he tweaks the loudness, he bounces the tracks and he’s set.
This is the critical thing about the Puff Puff MixPass: it makes things LOUDER without really affecting amplitude.
#2 Puff to Undo Limiting
Another tip/application courtesy of Jason Soudah. Jason is another one of those guys that can play everything, sings, engineers, produces, composes, but the bulk of his work is in film and TV scoring. And he’s not Canadian.
Jason has been working on a major film soundtrack, and he’s riding herd over hours worth of music with thousands of tracks and an ungodly plugin count.
One of the critical things he has to do is make alternate mixes for different uses — with vocals, without, for live use, as a backing track, mixes for different languages, etc. But depending on the type of mix, there can be lots of minor alterations throughout. For instance, the horns might be pulled down a bit during vocal sections, but when it’s an instrumental only mix, then the horns are going up and down all over the place, so the automation needs to be re-written. And then that track is feeding through a limiter on the mix bus, but because the mix might be missing things, the way the limiter is responding can be weird, like it pushing down swells and sucking the excitement out of things.
So, Jason’s been running mixes through the Puff Puff AFTER the limiter, using it to restore loudness and match levels with other mixes. As a side benefit, the Puff tends to increase dynamic range because of the way it affects transients, resulting in bigger and brighter mixes without losing headroom, and in some cases gaining headroom.
Vault of Marco
Oh, that Marco... you never know what comes out of his vault... wonderful song by Big Star.
Lovely recording of acoustic guitars - small diaphragm Neumanns through a Spectrasonics console into an LA-176.
Something upbeat and gorgeous to one through the work of the week calls. Y’all be cool.
Luke
A very common technique in the old days was the Mixback. Basically, engineers would print whatever was going through the master bus (the stereo bus) to two open tracks on the 24-track master. Can you believe there was a time when 24-tracks was too many? Actually you can find track sheets from 8-track and 16-track recordings with lots of open tracks.
The mixback tracks were a running record of whatever was in the master bus during the session. They gave the engineer a good-sounding mix just by pushing up two faders.
If you needed to do overdubs, you’d just bring up the two mixback tracks and there was a headphone mix ready to go. Need more of something like the lead vocal? Bring up the lead vocal track a little bit and now the mix has more lead vocal. Need less bass? Piece of cake: reverse the phase on the individual bass track, slide up the fader and the phase cancellation lowers the volume of the bass in the mix! How cool is that? And yes, it really does work!
A better mixback trick: you could “punch in” the mix. If you didn’t have automation, with a mixback you could work on each individual section, punching in and out to do all sorts of difficult mix moves. And if the record company wanted changes to the mix, that was easy to do — add tracks in or lower them using the phase trick.
Automation ended the Mixback, or did it? With a DAW, bouncing rough mixes and then bringing them back into the session is very useful. It makes fixing latency issues a breeze: bring up the mixback mix, mute all the individual tracks and turn off any plugins on the mix bus. You can tweak the mixback by bringing up individual tracks, reversing the phase if you need to lower the volume of something, and then bounce that and bring it back into the session.
With a bit of ingenuity and enough ins and outs on your interface, you can even do a real mixback: route the master bus output to two tracks of the DAW (make sure you mute those tracks to avoid feedback), and then you can punch in and out of your mix just like the good old days. I mix this way all the time, punching the mix in section by section. And because it’s digital, there’s no generational loss or hiss build-up.
Happy New Monday!
Actor Donald Sutherland died last week.
I recalled he was in a Kate Bush video for the song Cloudbusting.
The song is an odd one, the video is a strange one, but it is Kate Bush, and she is one of those people who does whatever they want.
In the video, Sutherland and Kate Bush play a father and a son, based on psychologist Wilhelm Reich and his son, Peter, and inspired by Peter’s memoir A Book of Dreams.
Peter Reich adored his dad; his dad’s controversial ideas ended up getting him imprisoned — there’s a Kafka-esque scene in the video in which the father is taken away. Somehow Kate Bush turns it into a top twenty single.
Here’s a deeper dive into the making of the video.
You never know where inspiration might come from.
Humanizing Grooves: Pull and Push
In the studio, I always spent a lot of time on how things felt, on the groove of the song, whether it be humans or computers or a bit of both. On drum machines and software like that in Logic, or in packages like Superior Drummer, there are tons of options and controls, in addition to amazingly well-recorded drum sounds.
One of the key controls is whether the drum part is Pushed, or Pulled - pushed meaning the part is slightly ahead of the beat, pulled meaning slightly behind the beat.
Common thinking is that for something to sound funky and have a great groove to it, it should be pulled a bit behind the beat. I used to think so, but after experimenting and listening, I now think it is a lot more complex than that.
Here are some guidelines for your thinking on this. These aren’t rules but it's hard to find exceptions. Of course, this is all based on my hearing and feel for grooves. Your results might be different.
Guidelines for Grooves
Eight Notes are almost always pushed a bit ahead of the beat. And this makes sense from a physical perspective. Yes, there are swing rhythms involved too, but most rock and pop don’t swing all that much.
Listen to the hi-hat on this - it’s clearly pushed.
And kick is also Pushed. Which leads to...
Push kicks or whatever is doing four on the floor. Kicks are almost always slightly ahead, especially on 4 on the 4 stuff like this song here.
Note that these are all real drummers playing real kits. Next guideline:
The snare can be pulled. It's not always pulled, but very often it’s either pulled or the arrangement is doing something such that the snare seems to almost stop the flow of the song on two and four.
Listen to this. The kick and hats are pushed, the snare is pulled, as is the bass.
This is Hella Good by No Doubt. Fantastic live in the studio playing by Adrian Young. Listen carefully: you’ll hear at the start the whole drum part is pushing, but the moment the band kicks in there’s a slight slowdown and that snare generally pulls back behind the beat.
Perhaps instead of thinking pulled on the snare, think getting a sense of the whole song stopping for a moment, like the snare cuts it for a split second.
On this recording, listen to the slight change in arrangement on the fourth beat of each measure - the hi-hats drop out.
That snare “pothole” that breaks the flow of the song is super critical to that groove, and to a lot of grooves. Reggae players always talk about leaving space.
This Childish Gambino tune has pushed hats and kicks, a pulled snare that has that song “cut” effect to it.
Speaking of Space
I watched a ridiculous Jason Stathem movie a few nights ago, The Beekeeper, and noticed that there was almost continual underscoring through all the dialog. It was distracting. Of course, we’re not talking great writing or great acting here so maybe it was needed, but the next night I watched episode 2 of House of the Dragon, and while the show is scored and orchestrated, it’s considerably less so than The Beekeeper.
Too much music, too much production - it can turn into a surrogate laugh track that indicates what you’re supposed to feel.
Space is good.
Thanks for existing in time and space with us,
The Guys at Korneff
Double compression is an awesome technique that totally upped my engineering chops once I mastered it.
It's basically using two compressors in series (one after the other) on a sound source. I mainly use it while tracking, but it is handy to use mixing as well, and in this blog post I'll give you ideas and settings for both applications.
A lot of this post will be centered around vocals, but the technique can be used for anything, although I use it religiously on vocal and bass. Religiously. I don't track either of those sources without double compression on them.
I was shown a double compressor by an engineer named Fred. He had been at Media Sound in NYC in the 70s, which is where he learned it. I was working in his studio, tracking a crappy bassist. Fred came in, put 2 DBX 160a's on the channel, tweaked a few knobs and lo and behold, suddenly it seemed the guy could actually play.
Why Two Compressors?
Recording on analog tape was really an exercise in minimizing tape hiss, and the most important thing you could do was record your tracks at as high a level as possible to get as high a signal to noise ratio as possible. Yes, you wanted a signal to have dynamics to it, that interesting up and down of volume and intensity that conveyed emotion, but you didn't want to overload things so much so that you heard distortion, and you didn't want things so quiet that they "fell into the mud,” down in there in the hiss.
Ideally, say with a rock vocal, you wanted to restrict that singer’s output level to about a 9dB swing on the VU meter, with the quietest stuff down around -7 and the loudest about +2, just moving out of the red — call this Maximum Meter Swing. Usually, though, for the majority of the vocal, you want a much tighter meter swing.
You could, of course cut the vocal higher than that, especially if it was a screamer for a singer, because they were already reducing their dynamic range by screaming. Having a vocal hit the tape a little too hard on high, loud notes sounded good, too, adding a little extra grit and mojo.
With a singer with good mic technique, cutting a vocal was easy; you'd throw a DBX 160 or a 1176 on it, or if you were at a better studio an LA-2a (or if you were really lucky a BA-6a or, gulp, a Fairchild) on at and you were done*.
But if the singer was all over the place, you'd need a lot of compression to get it on tape correctly, and lots of compression sounded bad — pumpy, with a loss of high end. Again, sometimes you wanted that if the genre called for it, but not usually.
3 to 6dB of gain reduction on a vocal was usually inaudible, but if that climbed up into the 10 to 15dB range, it sounded terrible to my ears.
Double compression solves the issue by splitting the amount of gain reduction needed across two compressors. The first compressor handles the first 6dB on compression; the 2nd compressor takes care of anything above that. Think sometimes none, often one, sometimes both. Also, because the waveform is "pre-compressed" when it hits the second compressor, the second doesn't impart as many negative artifacts to the signal. In fact, you can really squash hard with the second compressor without it sounding awful.
These days, y'all don't worry about signal to noise ratio that much, but mastering double compression means much less work in the mix automating and fixing things because levels are a mess.
Double compression changes the way you track dynamically active signals. I was able to lay these gorgeous vocals on tape that required almost nothing in the mix in terms of automation (I hated using automation - another thing to write about). I started using double compression on bass, acoustic guitars, sometimes on percussion—anything that was all over the place on the meters got double compressed while tracking it down to tape.
Tracking/Analog Settings
I went through a bunch of different compressor setups back in the day, and sometimes I was limited to what was in the studio, but my usual setup was/is a Summit TLA-100 followed by an Aphex 551 Expressor.
Base settings were generally compressor 1 is "softer and slower" and the compressor 2 is "harder and faster."
Compressor 1:
I usually use a soft knee compressor with a ratio under 4:1. I want a fairly slow attack and a longer release. Ideally, the attack is long enough to let some of the transient through so there is some punch, and the release is long enough so that the output is consistent.
Compressor 2:
I use a hard knee setting, and the ratio above 8:1. I want the attack fast so that it hits fast transients coming through — sort of like a limiter — and the release fast as well.
When setting these two, of course use your ear, but you also need to watch and interpret the meters. I prefer VU meters, because I'm so used to them. The output level meter to watch is that of the second compressor, or the input meter of the channel. Again, I prefer swinging arm meters over bars that light up.
When things are very quiet, I don't want to see any movement on the gain reduction meters and I'm looking for output levels to be around -5dB or so, certainly not much less than that.
As signals get louder, I want to see the first compressor meter moving, but not by much, and no activity on the second compressor's meter.
Once the signal hits its "average performance" level, I'm looking for the first compressor to be in steadily, with the gain reduction meter swinging down to around -2 to -5dB. The meter movement, as I often write, should look like the way the signal sounds.
The second compressor's meter should be very twitchy and jumpy, moving a lot but not by very much. The output meter of the second compressor should hang around 0, the VU meter on the console matching it.
When things get loud, both compressors should be in a lot, the first for 6dB to 8dB on gain reduction, the second for, well, basically whatever is needed to keep the output meter from getting above about +3dB.
There are also times when the second compressor might kick in for a split second and the first doesn't do anything — this should happen when a really fast transient goes by, like a slapped bass note.
Now, the levels on your digital input... this could be argued over and discussed til everyone is dead. I try to keep the max peaks under -6, with things averaging around -15dB. This correlates well with my experiences using analog tape, giving me about the same headroom. But there are no firm rules here, and everyone does this differently. And please note these are levels for TRACKING into an individual track. These are not not not suggested mix bus or group bus levels.
Mixing/Digital Settings
You modern guys don't have tape hiss as an issue, and I'll bet a lot of you are tracking with a mic through an interface, riding bareback with no hardware compressor, and then compressing on the mix side. Here are some settings for you, using the Pawn Shop Comp. Two instantiations on one channel are PERFECT for this sort of application, perhaps even better than perfect.
The basic idea is the same as tracking: we want the first one soft and slow, the second hard and fast. Here are some visuals along with settings from an actual session fixing a vocal.
The critical setting is going to be the threshold. On Compressor 1, watch the meter and listen. You want a sluggish, sort of musical movement to it. On compressor 2, the movement should be twitchy and fast. That meter shouldn't "lock up" until that signal is loud.
The rear panel controls of the PSC offer you a ton of extra options. Here are some ideas:
On the first compressor, use the tone controls to "push into" the second compressor in different ways. For example, if something is a bit too warm, like a chesty vocal, cut a little at 171Hz and see how that affects the overall functioning of both compressors. Remember, you can always restore stuff using the tone controls on the second compressor.
I tend to boost highs on the second compressor, rather than the first. It just seems to work better. +3dB @ 2.4kHz is a nice touch.
To get a more aggressive sound, use the preamp on the first compressor to add some saturation.
To get a more classic late 60s 70s soul music vocal sound, set the preamp of the second compressor such that when it gets hit hard there's a bit of grit on the vocal. There's also the OPERATING LEVEL control of both compressors to play with.
Man, if I had two hardware Pawn Shop Comps, I would be in tracking heaven. If you’ve not played around with the PSC yet, get a demo installer and use it.
So there you have it, a bunch of settings and a bit of backstory.
And now, as Fred used to growl at interns in the studio, "Go cut that 'f**king track."
*Do you all realize how spoiled you are when it comes to compressors, these days?
Additional Notes:
Most of the time, back in the day, compression was used to restrict dynamic range, not to give something character. The whole "character piece" thing... I don't recall that from my years in the studio that much. Gear either sounded good or it didn't, you either liked it or you didn't. I was usually looking for things to not sound compressed.
The Summit TLA-100 is a monster. It's a tube compressor but it doesn't sound or work like a typical opto or vari-mu unit. It's really versatile (it has switchable attack and release times) and can be used on literally anything. My Desert Island compressor... other than the Pawn Shop Comp.
The Aphex 551... why this compressor never achieved huge fame is beyond me. It is very clean — probably a little too uncolored for most people — and it has adjustable EVERYTHING: attack, release, ratio, knee, upward expansion of the high end, keying, etc. Probably too many controls for most people as well. But man, you could make this thing sound punchy or as utterly invisible as required.
Happy Monday!
This week it seems we are revolving a bit around mixing.
Read This Article
This is a wonderful dual interview featuring legendary mixing god Bob Clearmountain (Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, everybody), and the brilliant Jesse Ray Ernster (Kanye West, Doja Cat, Burna Boy).
It covers careers, fave gear, technology—there’s a huge chunk where these two breakdown mixing in ATMOS—the origin story of the NS-10 as a studio speaker, and more.
It’s also funny and warm: these two guys have total respect for each other and a great friendship. It’s how life should be. Very worth a read.
Cool, not perfect
Mixing can get very clinical, nitpicky, and anal, and far too technical. Often, my favorite mixes have something wrong about them that makes them more memorable.
It’s like a beautiful face: sometimes there’s a flaw on that face that makes it stand out and even more interesting.
Look at models. Some of them are really weird looking, but there’s something gorgeous about that.
This Roberta Flack song is a mixing mess. Have a listen and then read on.
What is up with that kick, right? It’s HUGE. And it’s panned to the right. It sounds like someone beating a suitcase with a soup ladle. There’s a ton of stuff and gook in the low mids.
I met the guy that mixed it, Gene Paul (Les Paul’s son). He was mastering a record I had mixed, and when I commented on how one thing had too much bass on it, Gene said, “I put way too much foot on Killing Me Softly, but it worked.” It sure did.
The song I put too much bass on... not so much. Sigh.
Another mess, courtesy of The Beatles
This is probably less about the choices made and more about the technology limitations of the time, but this is an oddball mix even by Beatles standards.
The drums are totally lost except every now and again there’s this really quiet go ‘round fill in the back corner off to the left. But there is a lead tambourine on it! It’s the loudest thing on the track, other than the vocals.
Big fave moment at 1:51: There’s a great guitar riff that is super loud for like two measures, and then is gone, never to return. What??
It’s worth it to note that The Beatles had so many great riffs that they could basically throw one away for a break. Other bands would have built the entire song around that riff.
Mixing, Ears, Speakers
While we are in the age of digital music, human biology and physics remain strictly analog. A mix lives or dies in that very analog interaction of air and ears.
Here are some useful thoughts and tricks on dealing with speakers and your ears while mixing.
Mix with your ears
Just a quick thought here: there are now so many visual aids to mixing—real time pictures of frequency response and the like—that one can get caught up in how things look rather than how things sound.
In the early 90s, I hooked up a RTA to an SSL and mixed with it for a few weeks. I would try to get my mixes to have a similar “picture” to reference mixes I ran through the RTA. I learned a lot, but mainly I learned that I didn’t get good mixes chasing a picture.
No one has ever said, “I love the way this mix looks.”
Bad mix. Keep at it or restart?
One can start with the best intentions and wind up with an awful mix. Or one can be mixing and just not be hitting it right.
Do you restart the mix from scratch or just keep working through it?
I found whenever I restarted a mix, I would pretty much get something very similar to the mix I thought was awful unless I approached it from a radically different perspective.
The next time you’re caught in a crappy mix, throw it out and start again, but do something very different to start. If you usually begin with drums, start with the vocals. If you like to get an overall balance first thing, start the mix with something really strange, like bring up the backing vocals or the keyboard pads and start there.
The point is to break your pattern. If you don’t break the pattern, you’ll just repeat the pattern.
Mix it up!
Warm regards,
The guys at Korneff
We are in the age of digital audio, but your ears haven’t gotten the memo. Nor has the air, or those moving membranes that push the air that we call speakers. These things remain analog.
To that end, here are some very analog tips and tricks for dealing with mixing using those analog ears dealing with the analog physics of sound.
Get multiple speakers
This is obvious, but it can’t be stressed enough. You want to get a bunch of different speakers, especially different-sized speakers, because your mix will sound different on each of them. You want at least one pair that is accurate (whatever that means), and you want some that sound awful or at least more like the speakers people have knocking about the house, the car, etc.
I used to use the bigs (the big monitors that were soffit mounted in the studio), the bridges (nearfields on the console bridge), a boombox (I had a Panasonic boombox with RCA inputs that I could feed from the console via an adaptor), and a pair of really good headphones (Grado open cup). This gave me a good representation of how things were going to sound in the real world. Everything but the car! For that I had to drive around in the car.
While big soffit-mounted speakers might be hard to get, there are so many great-sounding nearfield monitors, as well as cheap, awful Bluetooth things out there, that you should be able to cobble together a bunch of different speakers to mix on.
Multiple speakers are essential to getting the most mileage out of the next trick:
Barely crack the volume
Turn the volume all the way down so there’s no music heard from your speakers. Then, pick one of your multiple sets of speakers and slowly turn up the volume just a crack until you can just hear something. What’s the first thing you hear? The snare? The vocals? Keep turning up the volume bit by bit until you can hear everything in the mix - but don't turn it up loud: keep it overall as quiet as you can. Then turn the volume down all the way, switch to a different set of speakers and slowly crack the volume up until you hear the first thing you hear. The snare? The vocals? The bass? Again, slowly increase the volume until you can just hear all the elements of the mix.
Do this little test with each set of your speakers and compare. The experience of what comes in first, second, third, etc., should be consistent, but it also might not be, and that might be a cause for concern. Obviously, bass is different on a bigger speaker, but if the bassline is important and it shows up early on the big speakers but later on something smaller, that’s a problem, especially if the bass is a hook element. How about the sit of the vocals? Are they in the same spot on each set, or is it different? What about the feel and the groove? Does it work on the bigs but not on the smalls? How are reverb and ambiance functioning on each set? Consistent or all over the place?
The ONSET of when you hear an element come in is a huge clue as to what needs work.
Resetting your ears
In the previous trick/hack/thing I emphasized that you want to keep the volume low. The why of that has to do with how your ears work.
Two things: 1) Loudness changes the frequency response of your ears and 2) Your ears get used to how things sound at a particular volume very quickly.
This means that if you’re listening to something at one volume, and then lower the volume, the response will sound really different to you. If you increase the volume a bit, your ears will almost instantly get used to that new volume and that becomes the new “normal” for your ears. Also, generally, things appear to sound better to us as volume increases (up to a point).
So, if you’re constantly changing the volume around as you mix, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Start with the volume comfortably low and leave it there. Resist the urge to touch that knob—tape it off.
There’s a good chance that as you work, the volume you're mixing at will creep up, and you’ll also have to listen to your mix at louder volumes because it won’t only be heard quietly. However, once you turn it up, you really can’t go back to a lower volume unless you take a break from the mix and give your ears a bit of time to reset. I needed about half an hour early in the mix, but my reset time would get longer as the mixing process continued.
The point here is this: plan on mixing in chunks, starting at a low volume, checking things at a higher volume at the end of that particular chunk, and then taking a break for a bit to reset your ears.
To reset your ears, sit somewhere quiet. Don’t watch tv. Go outside.
If you’re mixing on your own schedule in your own studio situation, that’s the best. I had to mix while watching the clock to stay within budget, and it sucked.
Working opposites
It’s very tempting to mix the low things on bigger speakers or on headphones (good headphones have good bass response, usually) but the clarity of things in the low end is also about their overtones. Remember, a low E on a bass is 41Hz, and that’s a struggle for most speakers to reproduce. What you’re really hearing on most speakers of that low E are its Octave overtones at 82hz, 164hz, etc., and other overtones such as the Fifth (123Hz, 246Hz, etc) and the Third (103hz, 207Hz). There are also much higher overtones and sounds from the bass that give it articulation, and of course, all this changes on note-by-note basis as the bassline changes.
The point? Mix low-end stuff on smaller speakers. Now, if you’re doing EDM or something that's going to be heard mainly in a club, the upper articulation of the low end won’t be a much of a concern, but if you’re doing pop stuff that’s going to be heard on typical home setups, the problems in your low end won’t be in your low end, they’ll actually be higher up in the mids.
Your mix’s overall upper mids and high-end can also benefit from this sort of opposite thinking. Little speakers might appear to sound bright with lots of high-end, but what they really have, especially if they’re cheap, is a lot of presence, which means they push out a lot of 2kHz to 8kHz. If you’re trying to get cymbals and hi-hats right (whatever that means) on smaller speakers, or on cheap speakers, that might result in a bizarrely dull mix.
Headphones in the picture
As I wrote earlier, headphones can have accurate bass (or perhaps too much bass if they’re things like Beats), but where headphones are all over the place is placement and panning. Things panned to center are generally a bit quieter on headphones, unless the headphones are compensating for that, so vocals might sound low, bass and snares and kicks might sound low, etc. Left and right placement extremes are also weird on headphones. Headphones definitely increase spatial drama—reverbs and ambiance are much more apparent on headphones. There’s not much you can do to adjust to this, but you do need to take it into account in your thinking.
Don’t destroy your ears
My dudes, I can’t emphasize this enough: protect your ears.
Those ears of yours are statistically the most accurate of your five senses.
They’re also wired into your brain differently from vision, touch, smell, etc. They hook into your emotions. Into your limbic system. Into your fight or flight mechanism.
Without hearing, human communication is seriously impaired. Visually impaired people have it much better socially than hearing impaired people.
You don’t want hearing issues. YOU DO NOT WANT TO DEAL WITH TINNITUS. Believe me, you don’t want to deal with tinnitus.
Sorry to end on a bummer, but hearing loss and tinnitus is a bummer of an ending. Take care of yourself.
As a challenge, I’ve been remixing songs using just one of our plug-ins. This week I remixed with the WOW.
The video is a bit long, because I explain a lot and have too much fun, but the video is chapter marked and I wrote some quick takeaways below.
Key Takeaways
- The WOW Thing adds a lot of brightness and clarity. Plan accordingly.
- The more you crank up WOW, the more stereo-recorded tracks or submixed things will gain ambiance and reverb. More WOW = More Wet.
- Plan your bottom end a bit. TrueBass has a bunch of different low and low mid frequencies to pick from, so spread things out down there. Don’t add TrueBass to the drums and the bass and guitars and keyboards all at the same frequency. Layer things down there. Like lasagna.
- Don’t ignore the potential for saturation. Overload the WOW Thing (or really any of our plug-ins) and you’ll get saturation. Saturation will add subtle compression and some high harmonics to help a track to stand out without using a compressor or an EQ.
When there’s a lot of bass and warmth buildup on a vocal track it gets hard to sit it properly in a mix.
The main reason for all of the buildup is using a cardioid microphone and the singer being too close to it. Getting close to a cardioid = proximity effect = too much down there and a goopy, slovenly vocal track that doesn’t sit right.
One solution might be to use an omnidirectional mic, which won’t have proximity effect (unless it’s a multi-pattern condenser), but there will be a ton of room sound recorded with that vocal, and if you don’t have a good-sounding room, that will cause other problems for you.
I’m guessing a lot of you don’t have good-sounding rooms so you feel you have to record up close to the mic. I’m guessing there are a lot of vocals being cut sitting in front of a computer. I’m guessing there’s a lot of cardioid condensers used up close. I’m guessing vocals recorded that way are a PIA (pain in the ass) to fit into a mix.
Try this. BACK UP FROM THE MIC.
When you cut vocals from about 18 inches to 2 feet away from a cardioid mic, the proximity effect is very much diminished and you get a more balanced, “thinned out” vocal recording. There are some other benefits to recording further away.
1) The vocals don’t sound like you’re right on top of the mic. This is like DUH obvious, but that bit of acoustic distance really helps.
2) You’ll get easier to deal with recording levels. Vocalists bounce around. And everytime the distance from the singer’s mouth to the microphone changes, the level goes up and down, dependending on the inverse square law.
The inverse square law says that if the distance decreases by half, the level goes up 6dB, and if the distance doubles, the level drops by 6db.
So... if a singer is 2 inches from a mic and they move a little in, say 1 inch, the level jumps by 6dB. Should the singer lean back a bit, or even shift their weight to their rear leg, that moves their head away from the mic and the level drops. If they shifted 8 inches, which isn’t much, the level drops 12dB. Have fun recording a singer that’s level could be changing by as much as 24dB depending on their movement.
And have fun getting a decent performance when you force the singer to keep their head still and in exactly the same place, take after take.
Back that singer up a foot off the mic, and now they have to move in 6” to get a 6dB level increase, and move back 2 feet to get a 6dB drop in level. In other words, that singer can now bounce around a bit and the levels aren’t all over the place.
Do this: Stick a pop filter a foot or 18 inches away and stick the singer in front of it. They’ll almost naturally control the distance themselves without you saying much, and you’ll get a free, loose, easy to record and fit into a mix vocal.
Now... yes, you will get more room sound on that performance. To cut that down, use a moving coil mic or do some acoustic treatment. I think most of those little isolation shields that people stick around a mic don’t do all that much (because acoustics).
Make a little boothie thing with blankets or stick the singer in the clothes closet facing out with the microphone facing in.
If you’re in a good-sounding room, just record the vocal from a few feet away.
Happy Monday
Uh oh! We’ve wound up in Britpop, the early 90s music movement that brought the world bands like Oasis, Pulp, Suede, the Verve and Blur, amongst others.
Britpop is very English, with songs about English themes sung with English accents and harkening back to the English Music Hall tradition, which was the Empire’s version of Vaudeville. Obviously Britpop builds on music by The Beatles, Queen, 10CC and David Bowie, but also stuff from the 80s like The Smiths, XTC, the Cure, et al. Blur in particular channels Mott the Hoople. Singer Daman Albarn does a killer Ian Hunter impression.
Aside from Oasis, none of these bands did much in the US, which is a pity because there is some first-class songwriting, and, like a lot of music out of England, fantastic production.
Especially Blur. If you’re into extravagant production, listening to Blur for a few days will definitely give you a bunch of ideas.
Here are some mixing takeaways from several days of squinting at the Parklife album from 1993. By the way, these are just good mixing ideas in general.
The more sources you have, the more they should be MONO
And this makes sense if you think about it: stereo mic’ing adds width and phase shift and ambiance, all of which will turn into sonic clutter as more and more of it gets added in. So, think one mic, one source, or 1 input one keyboard/amp simulator. On most of the mixes on Parklife the drums are mono down the center.
Think CONTRAST rather than Reverb
You’ll get more depth and drama out of a mix when most of it is dry and only a few things have reverb on them. Again, the more stuff you throw into a mix, the more things get masked, and reverb and echo really mask things up. Listen to good mixes and you might hear a very wet drum sound in there, but chances are it only sounds wet when it’s highlighted by the arrangement. When it’s part of the mix, dry it up. When it’s by itself, wet it up.
Think CONTRAST Left and Right
Use the left and right and down just leave stuff in the middle. Especially on songs that are headphone ear candy. Parklife has things panning everywhere, in some cases languidly migrating from one channel to another. It’s fun! It’s interesting! It’s easy to automate!
Often on Parklife, a percussive part might be on the left, and something smoother and more sustained on the right. Or a percussive part is layered over a sustained part of the same channel so the two parts contrast rather than combine. In general these guys not only thought about what they were playing, but how it was going to fit into the big picture sonically.
CONTRAST by Sections
Contrast by sections. The verse has a distinct sound from the chorus. Perhaps the verse sounds spacious and the chorus sounds claustrophobic. There are clicky guitar parts on the verse and legato parts on the chorus. Change things up, in other words.
THIN Things Out!
Good lord, if there is one thing to remember it is this!
Everything is thinned. There’s an octave between 200Hz and 400hz, and there’s an octave between 2000hz and 4000hz. But one octave has only 200 little frequency guys between the two while the other has 2000 little frequency guys in there. But what is up above 2kHz? Cymbals? Violin overtones? Annoying keyboard patches?
Contrast that to what’s down between, oh, 150hz to 900hz. Like, EVERYTHING lives down there. Just about every instrument or vocal range has most of its fundamentals in that range. It's like the kitchen at a party: everyone wants to be in the kitchen. So, to get ridiculous clarity, either you arrange things — not everyone gets to be down in that area at the same time — or you have to thin things way way out. So, the bass gets its little own space, the guitars get their own little space, etc. Think of an elevator. There’s a weight limit. You can have a lot of people in it, but they have to be skinny.
Thin out the vocals. If you back a singer a few feet off the mic in a pretty dead room you get a thinner vocal that blends well in a mix and doesn’t have a huge amount of muddy warmth. Yes, you can shelve out the bottom end, but it is better to just not record what you don’t want. In general, to me it sounds like Blur isn’t constantly close mic’d. There’s true acoustic space involved.
Focus Focus Focus!
Parklife (and really, almost any good record) is mixed like someone directing a movie. During a movie, the director points the camera and tells the audience “You’re looking at this now.” A good mix works the same way: you’re listening to the vocals now, and now you’re hearing a drum break, and now it’s a guitar solo, etc. In other words, the listener is guided. The arrangement does this, and the mixing does this. PICK what is important. Make it louder. Change what is important on occasion. Let importance shift from part to part.
A Question and an Answer
We got an interesting question last week. Loyal reader Keith asks: “What plugins does Dan use? Is only Korneff or does he use others? The answer: Dan uses mainly Korneff stuff. In fact, often we develop a new plug-in because Dan has been using something from some other company and wants to improve on it. So, Keith, Dan uses the plug-in he designs all the damn time. And Luke almost exclusively so because he doesn’t feel like wasting time auditioning things. He just wants to rock and roll.
A Question for YOU
New Monday keeps evolving. We need some feedback from you all on how to make it better and more useful to you. We want you to be excited and inspired at 10am on Monday when you check your email. What do you like? What do you want more of? What do you want less of?
Dan and Luke
...and if you don’t, there’s an Opt Out link. We don’t want to waste your time; we just want to make it more fun and kinda cool.
VIDEO: Rick Beato interviews Robert DeLeo
Robert DeLeo was the songwriter/bassist for Stone Temple Pilots (and others). He’s a REALLY interesting composer and player. There’s a lot on how he approaches songwriting as well as recording and band history tidbits. Such a lovely person, and Rick Beato conducts sweet interviews.
Speaking of STP... this still sounds amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hhu-OyHqZM
Great groove. Wonderful lurking space on the vocals, cool chords on the bridge. Drums up a touch too much? Hard to not mix drums high when the sounds are so good.
Article: Datamix Recording consoles
A brief history of Datamix console, Jimi Hendrix and master engineer Eddie Kramer.
Datamix was the first console installed in Electric Ladyland Studios, which was to be Jimi Hendrix’ personal studio.
Hendrix died soon after it opened. The studio became a fixture on the NYC recording scene for decades.
Datamix consoles seemed to sound ok but had a ton of problems. Interesting stuff. Anyone want a Datamix emulator plugin?
Here’s a pic of a module... looks inspired by a Trident A-range?
We Love This: LOATH: Is It Really You
Gorgeous melody, surprising chord changes. A great recording that YouTube mangles... sigh. Mixed by our friend George Lever.
Same thing on Spotify - less mangled than YouTube.
!!!!! Tip when cutting vocals
Don’t know why this works but it does.
Singer flat on a note? Have them stand on their tip toes when they go to sing it. Singer sharp? Have them bend their knees on the sharp note. Sounds dumb but it always works.
Have a great week.
Dan and Luke
Feel free to send us comments. We always love to hear from you.
In the fall of 1991, I was mixing some big ass rock recording on an SSL console somewhere. I think I blacked out a lot of the details of this particular experience.
It went something like this: I’m mixing along, all is good, and in walks one of the musicians from the band. He leans over the desk and listens... and he remarks something like, “That hi-hat... it’s not quite right..."
Hi-hat hi-hat hi-hat... the more I listened, the worse it sounded. Like someone hitting a spaghetti colander with a metal spoon. EQ EQ EQ EQ EQ... now it sounds like ass wrapped in aluminum foil... EQ EQ EQ gate compress EQ EQ. Fader up, fader down... check the overhead tracks... GAH!!!! It sounds like shit there, too! What has happened? Who stole the beautifully recorded hi-hat that was on this tape and substituted this thing that sounded like metal baby turds??? GAH!!! Throw out the whole mix! Quit the career! Lock me in the vocal booth and suck out the air with a straw and leave me to die like a gasping fish...
I did a dumb thing. I focused on one element of a mix, and the more I worked on it, the more I mangled it and the rest of the mix. The damn hi-hat became the CENTERPIECE of the mix. I got obsessed with it.
I quit mixing for the night, made a quick cassette, and split for home.
In the morning, I listened to the cassette. The mix was ok. The hi-hat went back to being a just hi-hat. I went back to the studio, finished the mix off, and started on the next song.
I still don’t know exactly how it happened. I guess I was tired—probably 8 hours in on a mix or something. It's really awful to sweat through a mix over a fricken’ hi-hat. To spend an HOUR dicking around with a HI-HAT. What a dumb ass move. But I learned from it.
And I evolved a series of rules to keep me from falling down an obsessive hole again, to get better mixes in general, and, probably most importantly, to have a better experience mixing.
Now, the rules can be broken—sometimes you have to break them. They’re more suggestions then commandments, but try a few and see what happens.
How To Avoid This
1) Automate your mutes first thing if there is a firm arrangement. Then push up all the faders, and with NO SOLOING (and no effects or EQ), get your initial mix. Run the song from beginning to end. Mix EVERYTHING—every instrument and every section. Don’t touch an effect or a processor or an EQ (or solo anything) until you get something cohesive that makes sense.
2) Mix from beginning to end and not specific sections. I used to loop the tape deck and set it to autoplay, so I would work the whole song, have a pause as the deck wound back, and then work the whole song again. This keeps you from spending any more time than the length of maybe a verse working on any one element of the mix. You’re working on that guitar solo and OOPS! Over! You’ll just have to wait 'til it comes back 'round.
3) Set a time limit. Give yourself 20 seconds to work on a part or instrument, then move on. Go fast. Rule #2 generally makes spending too much time on any one element hard, but reinforce this by setting a limit. Set your phone to beep every 20 seconds. When it beeps, move on.
4) Try not to solo things, which is impossible (let’s be real), but do try to solo things in pairs or small groups. Working on the bass? Solo it, the kick, that low drone keyboard part and maybe the room tracks, and then perhaps work on that whole group, jumping from channel to channel, a little touch here, a little touch there. Think of groupings of sounds and instruments that occupy the same frequency range, and solo that group. Working on vocals? Make sure you have the hi-hat in there, any acoustic guitars, any keyboard pads. Instruments in the same frequency range will affect each other, so think of them and treat them as groups.
5) Round-robin your monitoring. Work for a minute on the near fields, switch over to something that sounds like a shitty iPhone, and then to a headphone, and then to the big monitors. Do this as the song plays from beginning to end. Break up the order of switching as you do this. Switch in pairs—listen on the iPhone, then on the bigs. Of course, don’t do this for the whole mix because you’ll drive yourself crazy. Maybe at the end of an hour, lean back and have a listen. Have the assistant randomize the switching of the monitors for you—they’ll feel important!
6) Fuck bleed. It probably isn’t a problem. Headphone leakage on a vocal is almost never a problem unless you decide to do an acapella vocal thing by muting out all the other channels of the mix, which is unlikely. Drum bleed is usually a non-issue unless you’re doing some extreme eq’ing and processing on something like a tom track, and somehow that is effecting the snare. Bring up the faders of all the tracks of the kit, balance it out so it sounds good. Once you chuck in all the other stuff of the mix, there’s going to be so much masking you won’t hear any bleed. Not always, but in hundreds of mixes, bleed was never an issue unless I made it an issue in my own dumb head. Go listen to a great live album like Rock ’n' Roll Animal or Donny Hathaway Live. Tons of bleed on these records that you’ll never notice, and they sound amazing. Don’t get hung up on bleed.
7) Take a break every hour. Get out of the studio, and if you can, go outside. Let nature reset your hearing a bit. Breath some air. Fart. Have some water. Remember caffeine and sugar screw with your blood pressure and screw with your hearing because of that.
8) Be REALLY CAREFUL who is in the studio with you while you’re mixing. Choose your company wisely. Get the band out of the room, or out of the studio totally, if possible. I can’t emphasize how important this is. To do a great mix, you have to be in a really good headspace. The wrong comment at the wrong time can totally fuck you up. I used to tell my assistants that they weren’t allowed to say ANYTHING unless there was a technical issue or an emergency. And if I said anything positive—“This sounds good”—that they had to agree even if they thought it sounded like shit. AND if I said anything negative—“This sounds like shit”—they had to either shut up or say, “I dunno, I kinda like it.”
The band... it really is for everyone’s good that the band isn’t at the mix. The Beatles used to go to the pub around the corner from Abby Road. Encourage the band to go to the pub. I used to work out of a studio that was adjacent to a strip club. It was a great setup. Give the band a bunch of singles and get that mix done!
9) If you find yourself obsessing, or spending too much time on an element, STOP. Stop right there. If you can get away for a few hours, or even a day, then do that. If you’re stuck working because of a schedule, take a good break. When you return, if you’re still getting caught by the problematic track, mute it out—even if it’s the lead vocal or the kick or the bass (or the hi-hat) and work on something else for a bit. Let your focus widen to the rest of the song. Maybe tell your assistant (they can be handy, these assistants) to sneak the problematic track back in when they get a sense that you’re somewhat normal again.
There is no tenth rule.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to send a message.
Float above your mix like a cloud. Don’t fall into it like a raindrop.