Mixing the Insturments

Now this is weird and touchy subject for a lot of different musicians and bands. How do you mix a piece of music properly? Many things to think about here. Such as how much should the bass stand out? Are the drums too loud? Can you hear the vocals clearly? etc and etc and etc. Personally for me I have a really hard time with this quandary. As I have noticed that most even professional mix engineers and producers seem to have certain formulas that they fixate on and blow hard around that its the best way and the only way. I would have to say that I am one of the few that finds this whole debate absolutely absurd and subjective.

For me, discovering how to make a good mix has no concrete ideal way to mix any particular instrument in anyway. And in fact I hate most mixes I hear in even some of my favorite records. The reason being is that these days most musicians and bands seem to fixated on making a "clean" mix, or in other words they want to hear each instrument clearly. To me this defeats the entire purpose of what makes us emotionally react to music in the first place. A good clean mix where each instrument is heard I will admit does sound aesthetically pleasing, but thats about it. The clean mix looses all the dissonance and all the congealed tension that in the end is the thing that creates a strong emotional reaction is lost. For instance, when mixing guitar parts in the mix, too often these days you get what I call "a guitarist's mix." Where the guitars are heard, and boy do they have a fat sound. But the result is no definition in the lower end and the accents in the rhythm instruments are washed away. Thus all dissonance is gone. The important thing to understand about guitars is they are NOT a bass instrument, and all too often these days you get a lot of bands (metal bands in particular) who love that fat grinding guitar sound that chugs. So to compensate and to try to achieve as what they hears as a deep sounding guitar they turn that bass knob up on their amp. What ends up happening is the low tones that the pumped up on the guitar clashes with the bass and it just ends up sound like a truck shifting up the fucking highway.

Take for instance the first few Led Zeppelin records. Guitarists for years have been trying to figure out how they got that fat guitar sound. Some may be surprised to know that all the guitar parts on those records where recorded on a little ass fender bronco with a 6 inch speaker with no bass whatsoever. The reason those records sounded so heavy for their time was for a few reasons.

1) Heavy music doesn't sound heavy because of the guitarist despite what most believe. Nay, it is the power and the construction of the bass and drum section.

2) The bass is actually a lot louder in the early zeppelin records than the guitar, in fact so are the drums.

3) The drums were recorded by putting ribbon mics pointing at the drum set from about 20 feet away.

The result is bass at the forefront chugging the song along while the drums are booming as if they are in a arena and the kick drum is 20 feet fucking wide. The dissonant behavior that ends up happening is a heavy sounding congealed mass. The guitar may sound like its loud at first listen, but in all actuality its due to the concise mixing and recording of the three instruments put together that it creates the illusion of heavy guitar rock. So all you metal guitar heads out there, turn those fucking bass knobs down on your marshall and let the bass player and drummer to their thang so to speak.

Now I kind of went off on a tangent there but the point I was trying to make, is that when we start to ask how they got a song to sound like this or like that in a recording, don't take it for face value. While I was specifically talking about heavy music in the example I used, I am not by any means saying that what I had described about mixing metal is the catch all way to mix all kinds of music. Quite the contrary; the point was that you have to think about what kind of sound your trying to achieve and rather than thinking about what instrument needs to dominate or what needs to be heard clearly. One should rather think about new sounds that are created when these instruments create what I call magical dissonant behavior when put together. Brian Wilson had a similar term for this: "Vibrations"

A good example would be is cooking a good meal. Unless your a fucking 6 year old who likes the peas separated from the meat and so on, a more adult taste realizes that cooking is not about tasting the different ingredients together perfectly but rather its about the flavors that occur when different more basic flavors are put together in one bite. To me mixing a song is a lot like this.

You will lose yourself trying to discover that magic formula for mixing music because there is no such thing. Rather, you should just take it on a song by song basis and ask yourself such questions as: what am I trying to say in the music? what is the overall sound I'm going for? Which instrument is carrying the main theme of the tune (which doesn't necessarily mean the vocals all the time, although you may get someone who staunchly believes that all other instruments are just meant to accompany said vocals)? Despite the example I used for heavy music, the bass sometimes doesn't have to be heard. Some instruments you may not even be able to hear at all in the mix, but much like what salt does for food, it alters the flavor of everything else going on, so its not quite the same without it.

Musical Entertainers strive for a clean even sounding mix, and clear sounding vocals. Musical Artists utilize the power of dissoance and the behaviors of different vowels and sounds together to directly manipulate the emotional workings of our consciousness.