Mix Theory - Posted on 2014-04-21 by Jin Huang

Hey, good news, I’m back to the internet. This is probably the biggest lesson of the whole book, and probably my favourite lesson of the whole book. For the first 10 chapters, my favourite lesson was Tracking because that’s when everything is put into real practice; now that we’ve got some good materials, it comes to the stage of mixing, and this chapter is all about different philosophies and approaches of mixing. Now let’s go into it.

Date of Session: Apr 2, 2014

Time in: 11:00

Time out: 13:00

Lesson 12: Mix Theory

As we always say, there’s no rule in audio. Different people have different approaches to mix a song, but they are all mixing. Some people prefer to mix drums and basses first because they take a lot of sonic space, while others prefer to mix vocal first because that’s the most important part. Do whatever fits for you. The only time that you will mix very differently is for classical music because nothing is amplified and the conductor is controlling the dynamic of all sounds. Very differently, in modern music like rock n roll, people are using heavy compression almost like an effect. Anyways, as you start to mix, you’ll have to have a good image in your mind, how you want the sound to be, and then take good advantage of the tools and tricks to achieve your sound.

Another good thing to remember is that always be the best from the beginning. Don’t expect to fix a bad material in the mix, you are kicking a can down the road. Then everyone will be disappointed finally. Start from the very beginning of the song; if a song is arranged properly, then it is almost mixed on its own. The structure of the song itself will have the most profound changes to the final mix. The only trouble you will have in mixing is the time when two instruments are fighting for the same sonic space, but if the arrangement is perfect, we can easily distinguish them by panning and EQing. That’s also why a music producer will spend months of time with the artists before they go into the studio to make sure everything is done properly. Some people may not let you touch the song itself, then you’ll just work with what you have and be the best.

Now let’s come to some more specific ideas: EQ, compression and automation. The old debate of EQ and compression which should come first is controversial, but Lionel gave me a quiet satisfying answer. Since EQ is a combination of additive and subtractive, what we want to do is to throw away the frequencies that we don’t want before compression, and add what we like afterwards. That is to say, we want to do it as ‘EQ- CP EQ+’ because compression reacts differently to different things — they bring up the bottom end and compress what’s over the threshold; that means if you don’t compress and EQ properly, you may still bring back what you don’t like and kill what you want more about the sound. On the other side, the key of mixing is to make sure everything sounds balanced. Two ways to balance out the volume are by compressing and automating. Automation is the same as you pushing faders up and down to change the volume, while compression will take away the dynamics of the song. If everything is too heavy compressed in order to push up the volume, then your mix will be boring just like a wall of sound.

When it comes to mastering, there are two kinds of people — some of them will just bring up the overall volume, while the others also try to fix things. However, whatever the mastering guys do, they can’t fix things as easy as the mixing guys who have the individual control of every single channel. Also, background effects can be magnified in the mastering stage; that’s why a mixing guy will print a vocal up mix and a vocal down mix, just giving the mastering step more flexibility. Another process that will always be left to the final stage is dithering. Dithering corrects quantization errors; without dithering, your song will songs funny sometimes. In the digital world, there’s only 0/1, and dithering is the process that tries to remove the corners happen in digital. If the computer can’t understand something, it will either throw it away or make a mistake, which results in a pop or click, and every time you convert something, there is a chance for the computer to make these mistakes, so the less conversion the better, so is dithering. Dithering will bring down the resolution of your audio, so it won't take a lot of space. We are talking about dithering today because we want to save space; as the technology develops, maybe in the future people will no longer dither, or they may dither things down to 192k… who knows, things are always changing. 

Finally, I want to say something about the documentary movie that Lionel recommended to me and all his student, Sound City. It’s quite impressive and inspiring to me. It’s not only because of all the music they’ve made, but also their attitude and philosophy of making music — very human, very natural, very true. Sound City was about to close in the 80s, and it was because of the raise of digital world; but when they survived by the new record, they kept recording their music in analog tape machines. That scene was quite touching, especially with the music. I was deeply impressed by the guy who bought that Neve Console and bring the old Sound City to the new life of 606. I find a lot of his ideas and thoughts meet exactly what I’ve been thinking about, which is quite inspiring. This is absolutely a great movie to watch, and it’s also a quite different documentary movie which I would recommend to everybody else as well.

Oh, yeah, I believe two more blogs are waiting for me, and also a couple of things are coming up next week. I’m really excited about the new console, the tape machine, the new album and the live off the floor session. Just a lot of work to do, and I’ll be back soon. Stay in touch, see you next time!