Table Of ContentMix Smart
Mix Smart
Pro Audio Tips for Your Multitrack Mix
Alexander U. Case
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Dedication
v
For my brother Charles, the avid concertgoer, omnivorous record listener,
passionate guitar player, and resourceful recordist whose rock-star success in his
day job has never interfered with instilling a love of music in the next generation.
How cool is that?
Acknowledgments
xvii
The reader should know that if—and let's just leave it at if, shall we?—if your
author were a disorganized, long-winded, distracted, typagrafickle error, um,
typographical error–generating machine, this book hits the shelves beautiful
and organized only because of the essential skill, patience, care, commitment,
and professionalism of Catharine Steers, Kate Iannotti, and—especially—
Carlin Reagan, at Focal Press. Deadlines for this title grew increasingly specific,
so that by the end, they were telling me the month, date, time, and time zone
the next deliverable was due. I have no idea why … thanks, Catharine, Kate,
and Carlin.
Nicholas LaPenn's beautiful and fun, yet always accurate and informative
drawings are enduring and were so well-loved when published in Sound
FX—Unlocking the Creative Potential of Recording Studio Effects (Focal Press, 2007)
that we reuse the relevant ones here, about 75 of them! He makes the figures a
welcome study break from the text, but we still learn while daydreaming and
enjoying his work. I admire that he—an audio engineer and musician—has
such a good eye.
Jim Anderson brought to this book his decades of experience working at the top
of this field, plus his wisdom as an audio educator, in many ways. He performed
a detailed technical review of the manuscript, offering many valuable sugges-
tions. I fear that when he agreed to it, he thought Mix Smart was some sort of
bartender's guide. When he discovered its true content, he still read on. He's also
been a generous colleague, always willing to talk shop at a level of detail that
reveals both his talent as an engineer and his commitment as an educator.
My cohorts at the University of Massachusetts Lowell—Will Moylan, John
Shirley, Bill Carman, Paul Angelli, and Alan Williams—steadily advance my
knowledge of sound recording through the work they do, the art they create,
and the collaborations we have in the halls, classrooms, and studios at school.
They've no doubt long suspected this, but let's admit it officially: I am always
skimming their expertise.
My graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Massachusetts
Lowell forever increase the pace of my lifelong learning—restoring Edison wax,
decoding the soul of Stax, recording stunning tracks, and pushing every mix
to the max. It's my good fortune to be included in their culture of intellectual
curiosity, constant musicality, and a contagious commitment to hard work and
high quality.
xviii Acknowledgments
I am indebted to my many colleagues at the Audio Engineering Society (AES)
who provide a home for the essential research, dialog, and healthy debate about
audio. The countless interactions with the luminaries in our field through
committees, tutorials, workshops, conferences, and the casual conversations in
between has been essential to my professional development. I am particularly
grateful to AES movers-and-shakers Jim Anderson (again), Roger Furness, Bill
McQuaide, Steve Johnson, John Krivit, and Dave Greenspan, whose hard work
make the AES invaluable to those who actively participate.
My parents, Dolores and Joe, bought me a fixer-upper car before I could drive.
We worked on it so hard that by the time I had a license, I also had great respect
for the machine. This is typical of how they raised me. What a lucky kid, to get a
car from the git-go! But they provided it with an eye on mastery. How does a son
thank someone for that? I am spoiled by them to this day, but—through their
care and wisdom—I am not spoiled rotten. Right, Mom?
My best beloved bride Amy connects me with two of my favorite, most missed
students—Patricia and Stan.
Preface
xix
You wanna mix?
You gotta get smart!
Engineers take the achievements of scientists and find ways to use them, to do
things with them, and to make things from them. Wielding science to engineer
new works of art is one of our species' highest achievements. Glad to have you
joining in on the fun.
Mix engineers must create music based on a deep knowledge of the informing
disciplines: music, acoustics, electrical engineering, computer science, and digi-
tal signal processing, and—to a lesser extent—psychology, philosophy, business,
game theory, and a little dream interpretation and pain management consulting
helps. This call to action—this need to act, commit to, and create something in
a world governed by a rich set of rules, theories, properties, laws, and equations
from many related fields—separates the engineer from the scientist and the mix
engineer from the mere recordist. It isn't easy.
In fact, it is such a difficult endeavor that many who attempt it fail. Only the
most talented, most visionary, most committed, most inspired, most driven,
best educated, hardest working, most creative people succeed. If you want to
mix at a professional level and to make the sort of music that holds its own with
your favorite records, films, games, and concerts of all time, you must not take
the task lightly. There is much to learn. There are many disciplines to master.
Doing so enables your mix finally to be an expression of you—a creative expres-
sion that builds on a collaboration between and among those who compose,
those who perform, and those who know how to play the studio as a musical
instrument.
You've probably heard the uninspired monotony that comes from some kid
assaulting a piano or guitar with uninspired, untrained, two-finger noodling.
You've also heard what happens when a hard-working prodigy spends time
with an instrument—practicing, studying, exploring, and jamming. We hear the
difference.
Same thing goes for mixing.
It is such a complicated process that it overwhelms many. It can't be learned in
a day. It can't be learned in a week. Come to think of it, it's been more than two
decades and I'm still learning. The temptation to cut corners seduces many. We
live in a time in which the tools for sound recording are so capable that many
can achieve mediocre results. Just owning the gear, reading the manuals, and
xx Preface
browsing the Web makes average audio available to all. But excellence belongs
only to the most passionate—those willing to practice, study, explore, and jam.
People will hear the difference.
Mixing isn't just having the tools and toys; it's really knowing how to use
them in service of the art. We have to get beyond the manual and beyond the
web chatter. When a musician takes a solo, they aren't repeating what they
read about and talked about, they are creating. When a musician mixes, they
aren't imitating setting by setting what they heard others did; they are too are
creating.
In addition to the musicality of the effort, there is a necessary, very practical side
to mixing. It's not all grand gestures, special effects, and ear candy. Mix engineers
probably spend most of their time solving problems. Our mixes sound great
when we learn to spot and know how to solve the myriad little rubs, clunky bits
of conflict, and those occasional, fundamental failings that will dog the tracks
we are asked to mix. We don't blindly/deafly repeat settings from past mixes
in today's mix. But we do solve some of the same problems we've seen/heard in
recent projects, tailoring the mix gestures as needed to address this problem in
this project.
Our final mix is achieved incrementally, based on thousands of individual deci-
sions we'll make along the way. Some are creative. Most are corrective. Each one
represents a slight change in direction for the final mix. Each one contributes
to the final sound of the mix. To be a great mixer, you have to get most of these
decisions right, most of the time.
This book tries to up your odds. We study the core tools of the mix studio in
enough detail that we can truly master them beyond anything the user manual
tells us and get so comfortable with them that we can work fast without mental
distraction, and then mix! No top-secret settings are revealed here, because none
exist. Be suspicious of anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. Offered here are
organizing principles and highly focused strategies for navigating the infinite
possibilities presented to us with each mix.
When you get to work on Chapters 3 through 9, studying key effects one at a
time, you'll see a common way of organizing the mix. Every signal processor
has multiple applications. Any given device might have been invented for one
purpose, but the day after they made the first one, somebody on some session
found other interesting possibilities. We categorize and prioritize all the options
by recognizing three alliterative mix motivations.
The Fix
Problems arise. Some might have been anticipated. Some are surprises. Some
could have been fixed by the performer; others by the tracking engineer. Some
are big; some are small. Some are frequent; some are rare. But as mix engineer,
the buck stops here. Whatever went wrong, it stops with us. We seek out prob-
lems in need of fixing, and we fix them.
