Recording - February 2012 - 22

the song. So more often than not the chorus is treated differently than the verse. So, again, it’s about options... What works on one song may not work on another song, that’s why I have such an arsenal here. Why the difference, I don’t know, one might have been recorded at a different time, maybe she wasn’t feeling great, maybe she had a little cold, so I find a compressor that clears all that out; maybe she should have sung it with a bit more intensity, or he, and it’s not coming across that way, so I find a compressor that does that. At the end of the day the voice has to lead the song, assuming that’s the function of the voice. It’s either that or it’s a groove maker, or both; you have to determine what’s the function of the vocal. If it’s a funk thing and it’s just part of the groove, there’s no message, really, that’s fine, but if there is a message, an important message that drives the song, you have to be sure that the vocal is really bright and touching you. I put a lot of emphasis on that approach.

it’s not. When I say the bottom end of the record, the bottom end of the record has just as much top end as the top end of the record—cymbals have top end! It’s just the bottom end of the record meaning drums and bass, so I’ll compress that differently than I would the guitars that, to me, is the middle of the record, and the way the guitars are hitting the compressor, the attacks and release, shouldn’t be the same as the drums. So if you have them sharing, and you push the compressor for the sake of the guitars, you’d lose the sweet spot of the sound of the drums and the bass. By sending the guitars to another substereo with a different compressor you can get your cool things going on, and the interplay between the two, and then you can do the two together if you want by adding some send and returns that share all the instruments, there’s no rule on this. A, the traditional way, I tend to do for the top end of the record, or the depth things like the synths, backing vocals. But now lead vocals I used to do to A, now lead vocal is the send/return where I send it to four or five compressors and they’re completely independent of anything else. Will you apply the brauerize technique to doubles, maybe the lead vocal as a double Well, if the lead vocal has a double I float them all to the same processor. I do this even with harmonies. I go to two buses, I always bring my lead vocal back up to two channels. The reason I have two is, one is generally for the verses and one is for the chorus, because the verse is usually a different feel, a different approach than the chorus. Quite often you have an intimate verse, he or she is singing in a low register, that might sound really muddy with a certain compressor setting, so you clean up the bottom end of the midrange and you get the kind of compressor that just brings out that quiet tone of the voice. And then on the chorus they might be belting it out. For a female, when she belts it, cleaning up that lower part of the voice, like you did for the verse, will make the chorus really hard and stringent and just unappealing, or maybe she’s hitting high notes and it’s just a bit shrill because you had treated it for something low; and the reverbs might be different, maybe there should be delays, you don’t know, it just depends on
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Most of the time these are ongoing masters, these roughs, they’ve been tweaking it for months, if it feels good to me that’s where I’m gonna start. But all these faders start at zero, I’m building my mix up here with what’s going on in there, and if I see that automation in there is counterproductive, if it keeps falling out of the pocket, I always know that feeling and I go “Ryan, is there automation on this thing?”, and then I ask him what it is and I go “OK, that’s the trouble, and from here on in keep it at that level” if whatever they were doing isn’t working for me. I mix a song in probably around three or four hours, so I don’t need to suffer through things they’ve already suffered through. What’s your creative process when you get a song for the first time, do you sit down and listen to it first to see what’s been done... I always want the client here. I ask a lot of questions. If it sounds like the story is important, I ask them to tell me what the story is about. I can hear the lyrics, but what’s the story behind the lyrics? Then I can get a better idea. I might ask “Why do you have a bridge? What happens at that point in the story? Is this where, you know, things are now being forgiven, or...?” Sometimes you can put too much hope in a song, or you can make it too dark when there should be more hope, so these are all important things when I ask these questions. It’s all a feel thing anyway. You can give it too much movement, too much excitement when it’s really still about stress. You can go to the instrumentation to give it more of a minor feel or a more positive feel, and by asking these questions you can get to it a lot quicker. I also need to know an important other thing: What do they like about their rough mix? I’m not judging what they did, they don’t know what I think yet, I’m not interested in giving them my opinion because I don’t know what their opinion is. It’s their song. If they explain things in a certain way, I might change, for example, my thoughts about the drum sound. It might make sense why they have the drums sound the way they do. But I won’t know that until I ask the question. It’s important to listen before starting to talk. So I generally shut up, I don’t say much. There are times when they’re embarrassed to say this, but within the scope of an album they go “We really love this mix so much, it feels so great, that we weren’t gonna mix it anyway, we’ve been living with this for so long, if you could make it just a little bit better” and then they tell me which way. That’s fine, what I’ll do there, I’ll match that mix, so it feels the same, and then I’ll get going, then I’ll make the little changes that I really feel improve it, and allow it to fit in the album a bit better. But they’ll never tell you that if you’re not open to that, if they feel they’re stepping “on your art”or something.

What’s the maximum number of tracks you like to sit down and actually mix? Just about what you see here—47 or so, sometimes it gets a bit more, but Ryan (Gilligan, assistant engineer) makes the stems for me, he knows how far to go, he can determine what has to be opened up because he’s been working with me long enough. I don’t need to have eight backing vocals that are all in harmony, I need two, blended properly. And a lot of that stuff is already being done in the original session, they’ve already blended those, that’s the way they’ve heard it, I don’t need to change that if that’s what they’re living with and it sounds good. I’m not gonna re-invent all those kinds of balances, I have enough of a job just to get the thing feeling right, I don’t re-do their comps.
Recording - February 2012

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