Christmas

Things are pretty well wrapping up for the year around here. Just wanted to wish everyone who I worked with this year a Merry Christmas or Happy (insert holiday of preference here). It was a great year and it is awesome to finally have CoLabs up and running. There are lots of exciting plans for 2007 and I look forward to making great music with all of you in the new year. See you then!

Anthony

Arranging = Mixing

A beautiful and well conceived arrangement is essentially the same as a great mix.

Mixing concepts share many parallels with orchestral arrangement. The spacing and panorama of an orchestra, the conductors control of dynamics and the wide range of tonalities and timbres in the instruments are all core concepts for many mix engineers in their approach to the mix. Even if you never work on traditional or classical styles, the concept stays the same. The music should have depth, a sense of dynamic range, and a variety of sonic colors. These decisions are made at both the arranging stage and the mixing stage.

I rarely work on classical styles or orchestral recordings, but I have taken bits and pieces from the school of thought that there is essentially no difference in approach between mixing or arranging an orchestra and mixing a hard rock project with lots of layered guitars. My feelings on arrangements that work the best are pretty simple:

1) Loud is relative, so play/mix things softer and with more space to create more impact on the loud portions instead of trying to play harder/turn thing up on the loud portions. 100% is all you have so make it count when you get there.

2) Play Less/Play more: An orchestra usually adds whole instrument parts in or takes whole parts out at a way of developing dynamics as opposed to always having everyone play something. Lots of bands feel that they need to have a part for everyone at all times and as a result, the dynamic range and impact suffers. A verse with four layered guitars, drums, bass and big vocals is cool, but it's tough to go up from there on the chorus. Try drums and guitar only under the lead vocal or bass and drums only. I do this in mixing all the time where the arrangement is too dense and the verses need to be thinned out some. Makes for a much more interesting listen.

3) The mix should pull you in. I like to balance things in such a way that you are pulled into the sound field. Practically, this means placing the lead vocal (or lead instrument) at a level so that when the listener turns up the volume to hear the words, the rest of the mix is at a level that seems to envelope your head. Basically, any really loud element that causes the listener to want to turn down the music or be "pushed out" of the sound field is avoided. Additionally, I try to pan things a little wide so that the vocals have lots of room to live in the middle without any loss of intelligibility. If you have used the previous two concepts in the arrangement, this is pretty easy to accomplish. Sting's Desert Rose Album is a really good example of this. You can't listen without being sucked into the sound field!

These are all elements that are common to both mixing and arranging and could work either way. Hope you find that useful!

New Stuff

I recently wrapped up the mix on the Amber Schneider album that I have been working on for the past few weeks. I'm quite pleased with the mix and used a number of new techniques on this project that I thought I would share.

1. Parallel compression: The new versions of ProTools (I'm on 7.2) allow for plugin delay compensation which makes this trick possible. You could do it in older versions, but it required a lot of fooling around with delay settings, etc. Basically, this technique is where you split a signal and only compress one of those signals. The combined sound is thicker and more controlled then the uncompressed sound while sounding less compressed and "pumpy" then the normal approach of just compressing the one signal. I have used this technique on drums and sometimes vocals in the past but on this album, I found myself using it a lot more. I was quite happy with the results. This is a great way to get a vocal to sit in the mix without squashing the life out of it. Also, probably one of the best tricks to use on drums to make them sound powerful and fat without killing those ever important transients. SNAP!

2. Minimal EQ: This is somthing that I have been leaning more and more towards. When I engineered the tracking sessions for this album, I tried to capture a really clear picture of the songs at that stage. I selected mics, pres and eq when necessary to get the sound "in the neighborhood" at the end of the tracking session. The session players where great and most of the sound was there so we just massaged a few things to get everything gelling at the tracking stage. Also, Craig Learmont (producer on the album) did a great job on getting really clean sounds in his overdub sessions. I the end, most of the mix was a matter of balancing levels, not "sculpting" things out with eq. I really like mixing albums this way. It truly feels like you are working with the music and not against it. Kudos to Craig, the players and Amber for their hard work on getting it right at the tracking stage.

I look forward to hearing these songs on radio and seeing what kind of response it receives. Blessings on your career Amber; the album was a blast to mix!

Later