Mixing: Don’t Compromise – Instead, Give Up Control

January 12, 2011{ 27 Comments }

Art-by-committee isn’t always the best approach. Creativity isn’t always a group process. And democracy can sometimes kill the best ideas.

Picture this: a dark room dimly warmed by the glow of a computer monitor, four tired people huddled on a beer-stained leather couch, – the mixing engineer hits the playback button and pure sonic magic roars through the speakers…

UNTIL…

The bass player asks for more low-end definition. Which makes the drummer ask for a louder kick. Which makes the guitarist want to hear more high end. Which makes the vocals sound brittle. Which frustrates the mixing engineer who now needs to find a different reverb. Which kills the magic and everyone loses. Which destroys the house that Jack built.

How quickly it all spirals away!

Recording Studios- the Safest Place for Benevolent Dictators

In most cases, the process of mixing a song is NOT best-served by multiple perspectives, voices, and contributors. When you meet in the middle, you’re forcing the song into bland, compromised territory, when one person’s all-out sonic vision for the tune may bring it fully to life.

If your band doesn’t work in a situation where one person clearly calls all the shots, if your band really is a democratic outfit, then I suggest 2 possible solutions to a creative impasse:

1) Give up control- Enlist a producer or mixing engineer who you trust, someone you’ve hired because you’ve heard and loved their previous work. Let them steer the ship (as long as they’re not steering it towards an iceberg). Give them time to carve out the frequencies, get the effects and volumes set, then… listen with open ears and an open mind. If you have disagreements, hear them out as to why they made the decisions they did. Take a few days off to let egos cool and revisit the song at that point. Does it sound better after the break?

2) Give EVERYONE control, but not all at once- If you’re having mixing disagreements, allow each person who feels strongly about the direction of the mix to individually guide the process for that song. You may have 2 or 3 radically different approaches to choose from when it is done, but at least each member got to hold the reins through to the end. THEN get democratic: vote on the “best” version. (You probably want to let the producer and/or engineer have a vote too, to break any ties,… or just in case everyone votes for their own version).

Agree HOW to Disagree

With both of these solutions, be prepared upfront to accept some outcomes that you don’t like. But it’s healthiest to discuss the decision-making process BEFORE you step foot in the studio or hire any outside producers or engineers. Get everyone on the same page to start with before you all go off writing your own conflicting chapters. You’ll have a better sense of how to wrangle the separate tales into a cohesive sonic narrative that everyone can, at least, live with.

-Chris R. at CD Baby

Chris Robley's Author Bio

http://www.hudsonkmusic.com Christina from Hudson K

These are some really great points Chris…I think it might be fair to say that sometimes, when a musician asks for something specific to happen in a mix, he or she may not have the experience or knowledge to understand how all the pieces fit together. You have to remind each other to respect and trust the experts you hired. And my personal philosophy is that my band is not a democrazy. I ask for opinions, but in the end, I am the president. I write the songs and I have to sleep with it at night. Band members need to understand this going into a project…that always makes it easier:)
http://www.hanson-engineering.com Franklin Hanson

Great thoughts Chris… It is key for the artist to recognize why they hired the engineer and producer and to let them do their job. Trust is the primary factor is that process.
http://www.steinwaypianosforsale.com Evan

Good points, thank you
http://www.steinwaypianosforsale.com Evan

I like the idea of leaving it to a third party which you trust and like previous work of. Nowday’s we all have strong opinions having done some form of home recording either on a DAW or digitally on multitrack
Andrea

ThanX for this full info portfolio overlapping me haha. I am a greenhorn, yu know, but this is how I would prefer a working process. I write my biografical based lyrics in two languages, playing a bit acustic git (not like a virtuose), find some nice harmonies and thats it. Yes, I would really like to try out, how it could develope into a really good music with piano, voc, bass, choir, background whatever.
http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/SalvadoreDaliLlama Mike

All good points. Songwriters need to understand that mixing is a separate art – especially when the song is reinterpreted by the whole ensemble. For those of us who record and mix our own songs, (usually because of budget limitations), one person may want to do most of the mixing, then let the others comment on the mix. It is best to have multiple mixes to compare. Also listen to your mixes as both mp3 files and wav files. They may sound good as wav files with headphones, but most listeners these days hear songs as mp3s on tiny speakers. The mix should sound good that way too.
DjMC

I love this article. I WAS part of a 3 man group and I was supposedly the “producer”. Anyways, I have a small studio at home and we got all the tracks ready to record at my place, so we can go to a pro studio to record them, just to record(money was also an issue)…Sooo, I walked into my first session at a pro studio, and all of a sudden there were like 3 people who I’d never seen before(their old high school buddies), all making comments on the track that we were there JUST to record, not produce, just record. Long story short, after 3 sessions of everyone and their mama changing the music, I decided to bail. This article explains what I was so un-eloquently trying to say the last time I saw them, good stuff, thanks cdbaby!
http://www.danbagan.com Dan Bagan

Chris,

This article made me laugh and think back on many many projects and what transpired through the years. As a producer/engineer I finally had to quote projects like this: If I produce(arrange, engineer, play etc) the fee is 1500.00 a song. If we co-produce then the fee is 3500.00 per song.

Dan
http://www.narayanjanet.com Narayan

Recently contributed to a project that was a group of musicians collaborating on some really fun and creative material. I was not invited to the mixing session nor did I expect to be but I was really disappointed when I heard the final mix. I suspect that Chris R.’s scenario in the above article is pretty much what happened. When working on our own stuff we’ll hand off the tracks to our mixing specialist who always likes to talk through our vision first but then we let him go. After he’s finished we do some tweaking if necessary but more often than not he’s exceeded our expectations, which are high!
http://www.frontlinethebos.com Frontline

I think one should Trust a producer and engineer, but it is always best to be involved in some way. I think it is Good to have an open mind, but in the end it is your baby and if you are a perfectionist, it will haunt you every time you hear something you felt strongly about. In the end, an Artist must create what he or she envisions or they cease to be an artist.
http://clovismann.wordpress.com/ Dan Walkner

It’s tough to walk away or hear the final product when your sweet solo or fill is on the cutting room floor. If you are putting up the $$, be leary of the extra pair of ears. If you are paying the extra pair of ears, don’t be afraid to trust them. If they are willing to put their good name on a finished product, it means a lot to them to make you sound your best.
http://www.taradoyle.com Ed

I’ve done a lot of recording using my computer. But when it came to recording my granddaughter Tara I was not satisfied with my recording or mixing skills. So I went to a professional studio. The difference was astounding, it was like night and day. That’s why they’re called professionals. It costs money but it’s well worth it. I intend to do a fuill album with Tara, and I’ll find the money somehow, to amplify her natural talent.
http://www.castlebay.net Fred Gosbee

Sometimes the committee approach works well – but the egos have to make room for constructive criticism and the band members have to trust each other as to what sounds good. The Worst case scenario is when one member of the band takes over the project. Nobody IN a band knows what it sounds like out front. They know what works from audience response BUT their own part is louder in their ear than everybody else’s. This is true for acoustic music, anyway. A fiddle player or a harp (not harmonica!) player have their own instrument stuck practically in their ear so naturally their perspective of the band “sound” will be skewed.

Get somebody who listens from the front to produce.
Randy

More often than not in band situations individuals are more concerned with the sound of their instrument than the song as a whole and in that they miss the big picture. Drummers seem to always want you to turn them up, but don’t really have a compelling reason other than wanting to hear the new cymbal they just bought. Guitar players tend to want the entire frequency spectrum to themselves. So many times I’ve had great mixes that have a nice harmonic balance, but if you soloed the guitar for example you’d tell me what a crap guitar tone it was.

Frequencies need to be carved so that everything has a space in the sonic spectrum or you’ll have kick and bass fighting or guitar and bass fighting, etc. Mixing really has to be a singular process with maybe one other person present but remaining mostly quiet. Give the band MP3 or WAV files to listen to for a few days and then revisit it if need be.
http://www.weiss-sound.com Matthew Weiss

Chris, nice article.

I’m on the other side of the great divide – the tracking and mixing engineer. The weird guy wearing a button down starring off into seemingly nothing, then making a little knob turn and starring off again.

Mixing by definition is a series of compromises. If you turn one thing up, proportionately everything else comes down.

But it works both ways – the band needs to trust the engineer, but the engineer also needs to trust the band. If something sounds too low in the mix, it’s probably that way in order to make something else seem bigger – but if that element needs to be up in the mix for the aesthetic of that genre’s trends or listeners’ tastes – or simply because that’s how the band wants to hear it, that’s important to take into account.
http://soundcloud.com/ep0ch ep0ch

Very true – thanks for this helpful advice. Always a good refresher.

-EP0CH
[soundcloud.com/ep0ch]
isispaul

Never a truer word said. Either leave it to one member, on another daywhen they have fresh ears, or the mixing engineer, if you trust him, which you should.
Zoobrag

That’s a great article. We use these guys who do exactly what it states in the article above http://www.stmastering.co.uk
Lionel

I am reminded of one particular track where we got concerned that the band was not tight enough (we don’t have a drummer and don’t use click tracks). There were many really obvious points where one instrument or another was early, or late and we started shifting the timing of individual notes.

At first the improvements sounded absolutely great and warranted, but as we got into it more and more, we forgot the engineer’s warning that on focusing on the minutae, it’s very easy to lose the sense of the natural feel of the ebb and flow of the beat and the feel. Even the engineer got sucked into our excessive use of the process. Only when it was too late, did we realise that we had done something quite damaging to the opening track of our best CD to date!

I still cringe when I hear that track, and I can’t listen to it on headphones when I’m walking because the timing is somehow unnatural

A similar problem can occur with over-zealous pitch correction…
http://www.theundead.com Bobby Steele

I’d swear that you were sitting in C.I. Studios, in February 1979, by this.
This was exactly how THE MISFITS ‘mixed’ ‘Horror Business’. Once the faders were pushed to the max… that was ‘the mix’.
http://undakova.com David

good idea to take this seriously before going in the studio and letting the emotions of the moment call the shots. Thanks Chris.
http://www.richardatkinproductions.com Richard Atkin

when you write a song while you are hearing a bad mix, you will naturally write a song that sounds ‘good’ with the bad mix. later, when you try to improve the mix in a professional studio, the song will lose it’s original flavor, and will often sound worse. welcome to the classic nightmare familiar to most musicians.

well, there is something to be said for the “studio band”. don’t mock it till you try it:
make your own studio….it’s affordable with today’s technology. don’t write any songs yet! get all the musicians playing as one…playing many different songs and styles that you all enjoy. spend a LOT of time mixing ALL the instruments until you can hear a style that you like. NOW write a song while you can hear all the instruments properly mixed. If you like the song, you can be confident it will sound good in the final mix.

richard atkin
http://renelabre.com Rene Labre

It is a joy to walk into a good studio and work with a great engineer and a producer.The muscians I hire or even the band are not present at the mixing/post production stage.And the producer takes the reins.A real producer is one who is a part of what you envision and instills the value to it.I want to be free to concentrate on the best performance I can put forth.To create the diamond in the rough and to me the producer is the jewler who puts the best cut on the diamond making it shine.As the executive producer I still hold the final card yet in mixdown/post the producer has free reign.I have been fortunate though to have worked with excellent producers who understood me as an artist.Yes they had certain perameters they wanted me to fall into yet it was always the best thing for the recording,it took me up to another level and I was a part of the process.One my website I release a lot of demo’s,rehearsals,outtakes and what have you that are not so sonically integral,they are just interesting in their own way or funny but with my productions, I am very happy with them as an artist.They say just what I meant.
http://www.thepuppetbox.com John

I completely agree and have often advocated for a 3rd party to mix or produce. But we’ve run into an odd problem over the years. In regards to “Enlist a producer or mixing engineer who you trust,” We can’t find anyone. I’m serious. Either people never return our queries (and they’re not major label type producers) or they give the line “Sure, I can do whatever you guys want. Here are my rates.” What we want is someone, as a producer, who has a strong vision of what the mix and production should sound like. Sure, it is based on discussions with the band prior to starting, but don’t you think a producer should have a personal opinion or approach?
I have likened it to getting your haircut. If the barber doesn’t know what to do with curly hair then no amount of discussion ahead of time is going to help. Has anyone else run into this problem, the bit about producers not barbers?
http://www.stevehilltrio.com Steve Hill

Truer word were never written.
Oakley From Summer Lasts Forever

I wish I would have read this a few years ago when the band i am in, Summer Lasts Forever, recorded our first EP. Learning this from experience was not the greatest experience, though we did learn our lesson. We ended up paying our studio engineer thousands on unnecessary dollars on what turned out to be, in our opinion, a mediocre EP. Thanks for putting our learned advice into words.
MATHEWS

this is a strong article that speaks from experience…I have been told this repeatedly over the past two years and I totally agree with all points in this article…what makes this most interesting is the amount of time I have spent thinking my views and decisions were best when against my judgment I allowed a musician/artist/producer/song writer who is my junior in age to hold the reigns when I am his senior in age…when entering the studio you have to trust, allow, take a deep breath and let go because what is best for the project takes creativity and experience from engineers&producers and others whether including or excluding yourself. Michael Jackson allowed others to pick what songs were placed on his albums and that executive decision to not be in control while in control made him millions.

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Mixing: Don’t Compromise – Instead, Give Up Control