Behind the Scenes: #17 The Mix
A Peek Behind the Curtain: A Solopreneur Produces an Album Recording
Next up in my recording saga is the mixing. In the recording process, mixing is like combining ingredients into a new culinary dish: a little of this, a dash of that, add some more of the other thing, and presto! You have a delicious meal. Or do you?
In the case of my simple recording (“simple” compared to others’ recordings, not simple for me!), we had now laid the tracks for the instrumentals and the vocal, and it was time to mix them together into a final product.
First, though, I had to edit the vocals in the same way that I edited the instrumentals (see #15 The Instrumental Edits). Once I’d sent my edits on the vocal tracks to the engineer and he’d processed them, we were ready to do the mixing.
Mixing in this case meant combining the instrumental and vocal tracks, then making adjustments as needed in balance and technical specifics.
The engineer said that he would like me to come to his studio to do the mixing with him. I was not totally comfortable with that, since I don’t like making important decisions of that sort on the spot, preferring to listen and ponder over the course of several days before making final determinations. In addition, I have a bit of trouble hearing and making aural decisions in an environment I’m not used to. But I figured the engineer had good reason for asking me, so I obliged.
That turned out to be a mistake, but I couldn’t know that until I tried it. Previously, I had always left the mixing up to the engineer. Then if anything seemed off, I would request a specific tweak or two to the mix.
Sitting in that particular control room (the room where the mixing console and computers live, the heart of the recording process), I found that I was unable to hear accurately. I wasn’t sure if that was due to my hearing or to the acoustics, but there was nothing that could be done about either, so I just did the best I could. The treble—in this case, the vocal—seemed inordinately loud, so when the engineer asked me if I wanted to bump up the vocal, I said no (a mistake, it turned out).
I had asked the engineer at the start of our session to damp the treble a bit in the piano part, as anything on that particular instrument (a beautiful yellow piano!) above middle C seemed to jump out obtrusively, and that is the range that would compete with my singing, since that is the range in which the songs lay. I didn’t really have anything else specific in mind, as I thought the tracks sounded pretty good alone.
Now we went measure by measure, and he seemed to expect me to tell him what I wanted. To be honest, I didn’t know how to interpret what I was hearing, since I felt I wasn’t hearing the sound accurately for reasons I just mentioned. Finally we finished listening to the two songs, and I left, not really sure what we had just done.
When I received the mix that resulted from the mixing session, it was not ideal. Keep in mind that everything the engineer does costs the producer (me) money, so I didn’t want to start nitpicking and cause a million edits which would translate into dollars, particularly since I wasn’t certain what to ask for. In addition, I was afraid that any changes I asked for might muddy the waters further. I had liked the tracks independently very much and didn’t really understand how the mix could sound so different.
I sent him a couple of general changes—namely, again, that the piano be softer and less bright in the treble—and hoped for the best. After I received the adjusted mix, I again requested that the piano be softer (it was still louder than the vocal). On the third submission of the mix by the engineer, I again told him that the piano was too loud on both songs. And the fourth time I again said that the vocal couldn’t be heard and requested he make it louder (which I thought might be better understood than saying the piano was too loud).
The result was better, although the overall result was not totally what I was hoping for, due to both mixing and musical issues. The volume fluctuated a bit randomly at times, a mix issue, in Come Rain or Come Shine. And as I mentioned, there were problems with the dynamics in the instrumentals due to musical and rehearsals issues with the score, and in the mixed tracks due to mixing issues. But I needed to watch my costs and time and decided to leave the recordings as they were.
Also, my voice was not at its best for the vocal overdubs. And I believe I chose the wrong mic. I went with the Neumann 89, which I had’t used before, and I believe maybe I should have used the Neumann 87, which I used successfully in the past, since the vocal in the current recording doesn’t reflect the brightness inherent in my voice. I’ll worry about that the next time I record.
So the artistry overall in the final recordings is not what I had hoped for. But I felt it was time to call it a wrap and move on, having learned valuable lessons in this process.
In case you want to have a listen, here they are: Elena Greco–Demos (ElenaGreco.Bandcamp.com).
I really did enjoy working with the recording engineer, Chip Fabrizi at PPI Recording—he did a great job on the tracks themselves, he was quite pleasant to work with and was obviously knowledgeable and capable—so I’ll probably try working with him again in the future now that I know better what to ask for and what to do to get the best recording.
The first thing I would ask is that I not have to make important decisions on the mix and artistry while sitting in the control room, where I cannot hear accurately and where I am uncomfortable making instant decisions that will affect me and the product professionally. I’d rather tell the engineer generally what I want and leave the mixing to him. If there’s anything in the mix he sends me that I don’t like, I could send final tweaks to him; I believe I’d get a better result that way.
I suspect the engineer wanted to involve me in the process so that I could learn from it (and if so, I thank him for thinking of me), and learn from it I did. Someday I want to be like the musicians in documentaries I’ve seen where musicians like Paul McCartney casually move the controls to adjust the mix exactly the way they want, knowing exactly what they’re doing. For now, that is not me! I do want to learn recording engineering in the future, though, something I’ve wanted to do for a while now.
Because I was out of time and money for this particular segment of the album project, I decided to go ahead and post the demo recordings on Bandcamp as they were and move forward with the next phase of the project … a bit older and a lot wiser. I told the engineer to master (finalize) the recordings and send them to me in lossless format so that I could post them to Bandcamp in order to publicize them.
We’re nowhere near finished—there’s lots more to come!
Next up: The Demo
A new installment of Behind the Scenes is published every Tuesday, except on the first Tuesday of the month, when a general post is published.
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