I’m perfectly aware that all allegory falls apart in the end. But I’ll still go and try to make my point clear with some. So have an open mind and please buckle up:
It takes years
I’ll have to break up my background a bit first to give a little weight to my ramblings.
I begun practicing mixing back in the early 2000’s. I literally knew nothing about making albums, but I was eager to learn. Having watched Tuomo Valtonen working at Sundi Coop I was totally hooked. He made my band Gloria Morti's first visit to a professional studio such a revarding experience and as a result we got several labels lining up to work with us. And Valtonen was definitely a big part of that. We gave him free reign in making our songs sound as good as he could get them, again, we knew basically nothing about what needed to be done and we knew we did not know. He was the professional, and we trusted him 100%. We had to. He was the one with the keys to a good sounding recording. He had made several before.
Fast forward two decades. As a person I’m fairly logic driven and I enjoy tinkering with technology, I love working with people and I seek the excitement of going into unexplored territory, learning something new. In hindsight I'm truly in the field I am the most use in for other people. And that fact lines up with my values. So here we are. In the spot I think I should be; Working as an Audio engineer, Mixer and Producer, at a somewhat peaceful location in Finland.
Little by little, during the past 20 years, I have gathered the knowledge and most importantly the time behind the mixer (Easily surpassing Malcolm Gladwells 10 000 hour mark to expertise) to start understanding how Tuomo pieced that Gloria Morti promo CD together. It’s like a complex puzzle with the pieces sometimes matching, sometimes not. Every time the puzzle is different in different ways. Then you throw in the fact that the puzzle is a living, breathing thing with people making changes, their personalities and their current place in life affecting everything. As you might see, the problem gets three dimensional quite quickly.
I don’t claim to have everything down, to know every little nook and cranny about making records. But I have run into most problems and been in most situations. I can call myself a professional and not blush too much. I’m also totally and utterly obsessed. I want to learn, I need to know how deep the rabbit hole goes. And it goes much deeper than where I am now. In a sense it feels like I have just dipped my toes.
Arrangement, arrangement, arrangement
It all starts with the song. It always is about the song and nothing else. As Rick Rubin has said: The execution is not the art, the idea is the art. (I’m sure I totally butchered that. But you get the idea).
You have a great idea that makes the hair in the back of your arms stand up. That ultimate melody, the coolest lick you have ever come up with, that perfect lyric. Now you have the art, the reason for the song to exist, the holy nugget. Your job from now on is to cherish that, to keep it safe and to make sure all ears are turned to that core of the whole reason why this thing exists in the first place. Anything and everything added will try to put out that flame, and you must protect it. And the most importantly, you must protect it from yourself.
You’ll grow tired of it and you’ll try to make it better, but little do you know you are actually just drowning that golden bit. You are actually chasing that first feeling you got when you came up with that idea. But you’ll never get that feeling again. Nothing old can ever be new again. You are just little by little destroying the very thing that got you exited. That golden nugget.
We humans are finely tuned to listen to speech. We concentrate on one speaker at a time at a party and can make sense of that important thing that is being said, nevermind the noise in the background. But, what if two people start talking directly to you at the same time. Now you have a problem on your hands. You can only listen to one person at a time. You resort to listening person A a little, then person B a little, switching back and forth, trying to make sense of both speakers. You don’t get everything, but you get the jist of both. Throw in a third person and you are screwed. You get bits of everyone, but not a single coherent story. You’ll need to stop the speakers and ask for people to go one at a time. What if one of those people was talking to you about something important and two of something of no interest to you? And in the end the content doesn't even come to play. Almost no information is transferred because you couldn't make out the words.
You can only concentrate fully on a few things at a time. For arguments sake, for a minute, let's use speech interchangeably with the act of playing your instrument. You might have five people in the band. What happens if everyone starts speaking (or playing) to you directly at the same time trying to get your attention? You feel uneasy and threatened, you are suddenly listening to something that you want to stop as fast as possible so you can start making sense of it. Contrast that experience with only one of those people talking to you directly and four carrying their own discussion in the background. Or everyone talking the same words in unison. Feels better doesn’t it?
That golden nugget needs to be the one talking to you directly, the other things happen only in support of the nugget. You might have ten golden nuggets, but they need to be talking one at a time, maybe and in very rare special circumstances two at a time. But that is pushing it.
Everything comes down to communication. Your band needs to understand the principle I laid down here, and you must communicate (literally, speak to one another) so that everyone knows who has their turn to speak and when. This is also why so many times bands with the songwriting firmly in the hands of one single person work so well. It’s hard to speak on top of yourself, or in other words, the songwriter knows what is the golden nugget and is unable to concentrate on second order things at the same time.
And just as a quick tip: Like it is sometimes said that a fine lady takes off one piece of jewellery before rushing out the door, you should too err on the side of having one less thing crowding up the mix. Always leave the least important thing unrecorded and let the important shine. And I’m talking quite concretely here. If you are a drummer, leave that extra cymbal home, if you are a bass player, don’t play that one extra lick, if you are a guitar player, record one less overdub. Ten of these decisions and suddenly the mix opens up.
Now you have an arrangement. Before this realization, all you have is noise. And world is already filled with it.
Of size and definition
This could easily be a part of the previous, but for clarity's sake I’ll put it under it’s own heading.
An album and its mix are something that needs to be pushed thru a very tiny window. You have a little iPhone speaker or headphones to push all that complexity thru. Imagine the sound being a picture. If you watch the most epic movie with big landscapes on a phone screen, something is lost. You can’t make out the details that make the movie look so epic. You don’t get the sense of scale. The same holds true with sound. In the end almost everything gets compressed and limited to play at the same volume. Wether it be Rammstein with their epic soundscape and size, or Julian Lage playing his lone acoustic guitar. Both will in the end be the same volume and size. This makes either Rammsteins thunderous drums like a toy instrument, or Julians guitar the size of a mountain. It’s hard to make out the details of the Rammstein splash cymbal because its relative size is the size of an ant. But in the other hand, Julians mountain sized guitar is free for you to explore. Every little crack in the lacquer, the winding of the strings, that little blemish on the fretboard.
This is a scale. The more tracks you have, the more you put in, the less you’ll be able to hear the little nuances, and by effect, the less lifelike the instruments sound. A session with a hundred tracks all at the same volume will make one track one hundredth of the whole volume produced, which makes Julians lone guitar a hundred times bigger and more defined than yours.
Job of a producer (As Trevor Horn once put it: “The mix is the worst time to do anything.”)
Todays music industry works in a new way. Bands are recording themselves and the tracks created are then transferred to a professional studios computer to be mixed by somebody who has been at it for long enough to be trusted. Producer is a loaded word and can mean so many different things. So I’ll just go and use it like I please (that is to say how I behave when a band pays me to produce their album.)
To me the most important job of a producer is to prevent the band from doing stupid things. Things they are unaware of because perhaps this is their second time walking the path of making an album. There are limitations to this stuff. Technical ones. Things the band has no clue exist, because this is their second time. The producer on the other hand has walked different but similar enough paths to a finalised albums hundredths of times during the years. Perhaps thousands of times. He knows things you do not even know exist. Let's read that again nice and slow. He knows things you do not even know exist. And this is just plain experience and hours behind the desk, you know, the thing that makes people good at things. Like someone who has played thousands of games of pool. I would never win that person in a match. In my mind we are just hitting some balls with a stick towards some holes. And this surface level view of the game is not wrong per se, but it lacks all the definition that makes one a great pool player. Here you have the core of your problem. One can enjoy watching a game of pool, and even notice when someone makes a mistake, but could never win the game (Imagine a typical, know-it-all sports fan trying to score a touch down). The professional pool-player is intuitively seeing the correct angles and the cue ball ends up in the perfect place after each shot. I can’t even make this analogy sufficiently enough, because I don’t know what I don’t know. But I can know, and I do know, that I don’t know.
The ultimate goal of a producer is to guide you around all the traps and the false paths while you are blindfolded. He makes sure that no problem is pushed to mixing, because that is the worst time to do anything. Shit rolls down hill as they say, and it’s hard to mix an album if all you have is a pile of shit. You are the one doing the walking, but you’ll get home much faster and in one piece. And in some cases getting to where you were going is a win in itself.
Money
Ahh, Isn’t this the topic we all love. Making art and talking about money. What a nice combination (Sarcasm ends here).
This is unfortunately the deal breaker, the only thing in making albums that trumps everything else. Get this one wrong and it all ends. The harsh reality is that we as audio engineers and studio owners cannot make albums with you if you mess this one up. No matter how talented you are, no matter how close friends we are, no matter how fun it is to work together. To not pay the bill on time is sending us engineers a very loud and alarming message: To keep working with this band is to not have money to pay your rent on time, or buy food when you are hungry, or to purchase that new hard drive to record the project on. This hits us all in a very deep place as humans. This shakes the very foundations of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Your album is our job, not our hobby (like it might unfortunately at the moment still be for you). We are working with your dreams and goals in mind. Understand that this is our salary. Turn the tables and think how you would react if your boss just suddenly pushed your payday back a month, or more. Like really think what would happen to your bills, your family, your sleep. This one is the dealbreaker.
Thanks for getting thru. Let me know what you think. In the end I too am here to learn =)
