Some Free Advice From Mike Senior

[mojobone]

Mike Senior is the author of Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio and writes the Mix Rescue Column for Sound On Sound magazine.

Top Ten Small-Studio Myths--Busted

Amongst many other things in Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio, I try to deliver a stout kicking to the following questionable (but surprisingly pervasive) pieces of received wisdom:

You need high-end gear to create commercial-grade mixes.

While great gear makes mixing quicker and easier, it's not a deal-breaker. To demonstrate this, I deliberately do all my "Mix Rescue" remixes for Sound On Sound magazine on budget gear in small home/college studios. In some cases, I've even restricted myself to the DAW's built-in plug-ins too--as Greg Kurstin did when mixing Lily Allen's hit record The Fear. If you won’t take my word for it, though, here's top producer Frank Filipetti: "Your ears, your mind, your musical abilities are what it’s all about. Put a George Massenburg, a Hugh Padgham, a Kevin Killen together with any kind of gear, and you’ll get a great-sounding record.” Tony Visconti is one of many others who back him up: “I’ve heard people make very bad records on expensive gear. The gear does not dictate the quality. It’s how you use it.” So I’m afraid that if your mix sucks, your mixing technique sucks. No two ways about it.

Use the speakers with the flattest frequency response.

This isn't actually the most important thing when working under budget constraints, because your ear can adapt to a speaker's frequency balance quite readily. When you've not got much money to buy monitors for mixing, a flat frequency response is much less critical than good time-domain response. Indeed, the two most celebrated mixing speakers of all time, the Yamaha NS10 and the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube, both have extremely uneven frequency-response plots, but excellent time-domain performance.

Trust your ears.

They may be all you've got to hear with, but if you're going to achieve pro-standard mixes then you should trust your ears about as far as you can stretch them! They will lie to you at every opportunity if you give them half a chance, and you need to stay vigilant to avoid being caught out. Ever had that "morning after" horror of realizing that last night’s great-sounding mix actually sounds like a wasp in a tin? Or have you ever carefully adjusted a mix effect for five minutes before realizing the stupid thing isn't actually plugged in? Those common experiences are just the tip of the iceberg, and it's only by learning to work around the fickleness of your own hearing that you can begin to get decent mix results reliably.

Timing/tuning-correction kills the music!

Corrective processing can certainly produce unmusical results, but it's important to realize that it doesn't have to, even if you're just using the editing facilities built into your software DAW. Furthermore, almost every small-studio production I've worked on sounded more musical (and became a lot easier to mix) once careful timing and tuning correction had been applied. And I've yet to have a single client complain about it either!

Start your mix with the drums.

That might work with some mixes, but it's often not the best decision. For example, in a lot of styles you actually want to give the lead vocals the biggest "wow" factor, sonically speaking. In that case, it's much better to start with those while your ears are fresh, and while you've still got lots of mix real estate and computer CPU power to play with.

Try to make every instrument sound its best.

This can be a recipe for disaster at mixdown. The moment you put two instruments together, each will inevitably compromise the quality of the other, and mixing is not just about deciding which instruments need to sound best--it's also about deciding which can afford to sound less good. You may need to make some parts of your mix sound worse in order to make your all-important lead vocal sound better, for instance. As producer John Leckie puts it: "You can’t have spectacular everything--then you wonder why the mix doesn’t sound any good, because everything’s crowding everything else. When you solo the instruments, everything sounds good, but when it’s all put together it’s a jumbled-up mess, so something’s got to give way.”

Reverb has to sound natural.

Wrong. Although realistic-sounding room simulation has its place in many mixes, there's a whole lot more to using reverb effects than that. Even the dodgiest-sounding reverb unit can prove extremely handy when enhancing an instrument's tone/decay characteristics, or stereo image. In fact, a lot of the established classic reverb units sound pretty unnatural (the AMS RMX16, say, or the EMT 140 plate), but that doesn't stop them from appearing all over the current charts.

Perhaps it just needs professional mastering? (If only I had the Celestial Systems Mix Perfectizer plug-in!)

I call this the "silver bullet" myth--that comforting delusion that the only thing separating your mix from the ones you hear on the radio is some single esoteric process. Well, here's some news: I've heard thousands of real small-studio mixes, as well as remixing dozens of them for "Mix Rescue," and whenever I hear someone utter the silver bullet myth, it’s never, ever a single "magic ingredient" that their mix actually needs! The malaise can almost always be traced to a whole selection of minor misjudgments that have been made at various points in the arrangement, editing, and mixing process. In other words, if you improve your basic mixing technique, the "fairy dust" will look after itself.

But you just can't do that!

In mixing the end justifies the means. Whatever you're given to work from, the bottom line is that you're expected to turn it into something that sounds like a finished record. It doesn't matter if you have to replace the drums with samples, stuff synth pads between the guitar layers, add new backing vocals, or remove certain instruments entirely--just as long as your final product sounds great enough to make the client a happy bunny.

Professionals don't make mistakes.

Rubbish. Professionals make mistakes like everyone else, but they turn them to their advantage. “You’re going to make mistakes,” says Humberto Gatica. “The important thing is to learn from them.” Mixing in particular is one long experiment, in which mistakes play a vital role by identifying any mixing tactics that are unsuitable for the job at hand. For this reason professional engineers at the highest level will cheerfully scrap a mix completely and redo it. “I will often restart mixes three or four times,” reveals Fabian Marasciullo. “Put everything back to zero and try again, re-blend and EQ everything.” Justin Niebank doesn't think twice about heading back to the drawing board either: "I’m not afraid to pull all the faders back down again if it doesn’t work. That’s too great a hurdle for many engineers: but if necessary, don’t get precious, and start over."

[Kolstad]

Gotta love Mike Senior! Refreshing advice, for sure. Just what I needed today. Sometimes I feel trapped in the do-it-right, column, and creativity suffers. Thanks Moj!

[coolhouse912]

Great book! On my first read right now. I seriously doubt it'll be my last read.

This guy knows.

[elser]

That was a good read, thanks for sharing!

[cardell]

That was great, thanks Mojo!

Stuart

[CHuckmott]

A real eye opener and my first text I returned to when I rebuilt the studio. Peer to peer here has been equally as helpful at least. A must read.

[cardell]

Brand new interview with Mike Senior from RecordingRevolution.com!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvjHj-Jz4O4

Stuart

[Len911]

Brand new interview with Mike Senior from RecordingRevolution.com!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvjHj-Jz4O4

Stuart

Even newer video. In fact this is the first video I've ever watched that says no views, so I am the first,lol!

I know this isn't peer-to-peer, but when you're advertising a book entitled, "Mixing Secrets for the small studio", you should at least try and de-ess the sibilant robot voice. I've read a few of his articles, this doesn't seem the caliber of what I would expect from him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n1XFOyvXaI

[jazzstan]

Mojo .. thanks for sharing that! I had to laugh " ...Or have you ever carefully adjusted a mix effect for five minutes before realizing the stupid thing isn't actually plugged in? ...." Been there, done that, humbled by the experience.

[Len911]

Something mentioned in the video was that Al Schmitt didn't use any or very little EQ.

Oram Al Schmitt Pro-Channel GMS
10.01.2005
Fast Facts
Applications: Studio, post production, live

Key Features: Single-channel mic preamp, compressor and EQ; three-way mic selection; switchable transformer-balanced or transformerless preamp path; optical compressor; six-band EQ; lighted analog VU meter; heavy-duty stepped rotary controls; external power supply; sidechain jacks.

Price: $9,900

Contact: Oram at 44-1474-815-300, www.oram.co.uk.
Perched at the highest end of Oram's range of analog rackmount products is the Al Schmitt Pro-Channel Grand Master Series. As its name (and the cute dual-flag emblem on the front panel) implies, the Pro-Channel is a transatlantic collaboration between British designer John Oram and renowned American engineer/producer Al Schmitt. Although the custom collaboration and limited demand for production result in a prohibitively high list price ($9,900), the Pro-Channel boasts several unique features and a top-notch signal path that may make it worth the purchase for well-financed engineers and studios.

(click thumbnail)
,
Features

The Pro-Channel is a single-channel recording path comprised of a microphone preamplifier, six-band quasi-parametric equalizer and optical compressor."

Custom collaboration? I think if I would have paid $9,900 for something in 2005 that was supposed to have a "six-band quasi-parametric equalizer", and one of the collaborators or designers didn't use eq, I'd be unscrewing the panel to see if there were just six wires for the eq section,lol!

http://www.prosoundnetwork.com/article/ ... el-GMS/849