Recording - May 2014 - 23

Only very rarely, really only if it's a project through Warren G. [a
rapper / hip hop producer who leases a permanent production
room at California Sound Studios] and he has a guy in mind down
the road for the mixing and mastering. I really do it normally. There
are five different tiers for an engineer. First you have a miking and
prep engineer, then you have the tracking engineer, then you have
an editing engineer, then you have a mixing engineer, then you have
a mastering engineer. I do all those things here on a given project.
There is a misconception out there about mastering, that it
has to be so complex. If you have a really great mix, then mastering becomes easy. The way I look at it-90 percent of your
product is in the mixing.
That's also because you have all ten or whatever tracks coming
from right here, so it's not like a mastering engineer who has
to match up ten tracks coming from ten different sources...
Exactly, we get much better results with mastering if we were
in control of the mixes.
My Dad taught me how to start with a mix, there's a process I do
every time, with every genre, starting with the low end of the song.
For example with a rock group, I always start with the kick drum, I get
that to sound exactly how I want it, then I mix the snare to the kick.
Not the bass?
Not yet, then I mix the hi-hat and snare to the kick; then I mix
the toms to the hi-hat, snare, and kick; then I mix any kind of
cymbals to the toms and the hi-hat, snare, and kick, then I mix
the bass guitar to the drums.
Then I mix any rhythm to the bass guitar and to the drums. So
I'm constantly building, but I'm still keeping those drums sounding
big and live. Then any kind of lead guitar or other instrument that's
playing more of a lead, I'll mix those in typically with the vocals
at the same time, so the vocals are the last to get mixed in.

I like to overcompress my vocals, but-maybe surprisingly-
I don't use compression on anything else. I'll eq the vocals, add
a little reverb and a little slap delay on those vocals.
Do you EQ before or after compression?
After the compression, I'll EQ out anything from the low end
that might be too muddy for the vocal. Sometimes the vocal
sounds fine, because I already take some low end out here [during tracking] so the voice sounds fine when blended with the
song, then I won't really EQ it too much [during the mix stage],
maybe not at all. We've released a couple of records where we
didn't really EQ the vocals at all. Then we need a little reverb
and slap delay to make it sound like a live performance, and on
to mastering.

Creative input
With pop, where everything is expected to be highly
processed, you can go a little crazy with the vocals, creatively.
That's my favorite. With hip hop you can only get kinda crazy,
depending on the song, on how the chorus is, depending on
what the beat's doing, but typically with everything else you gotta
stay pretty consistent. Maybe an effect here, an effect there.
On the whole, you don't wanna saturate a song with all these
crazy effects when you're supposed to capture how that band
sounds live. You don't want to change their sound, so people
who only know them live don't get put off by the album, and
people who only have the album don't get disappointed when
they go to a live show. That gap should be relatively small.
More about the work of Jesse Wright and his family enterprise can be seen at www.casoundstudios.com and at
www.wrightrecords.com.

http://www.casoundstudios.com http://www.wrightrecords.com http://www.adam-audio.com http://www.adam-audio.com

Recording - May 2014

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