WHAT IS MUSIC MIXING?​

It’s incredible how many times I’ve been out at a party or a bar and someone has asked me what a mixer does. Often they think I am a DJ, because DJs also refer to themselves as “mixers” because they mix records together into a cohesive playlist. It’s confusing for people, and apparently, the federal government doesn’t know what a mixer is, either.

Any job search for mixers on Indeed will yield no results for what I do for a living, unless you’re interested in getting to the cement business. “Music Mixer” is not considered a job, even though thousands of people have done it historically and do it every day in the music business. How can it be that the work guys (and girls) who shepherd the project to completion in a $20 billion business do is not considered for a job category? Well, in the dark ages, musicians were not given a burial…they were not worthy. Wayne would be so sad.

It might be easier to understand what a record producer is, partly because many record producers have been portrayed in movies and TV shows, and it’s an easier thing for people outside the business to understand.

A music mixer, I have often said, is a conductor with total control over the balance and sound of every instrument and voice in a song.

A mixer is literally the person tasked with mixing together all the sounds of a completed production into a cohesive stereo mix of the song. Every song you have ever heard on the radio or a streaming service was mixed by somebody.

When I was in college at University of Miami, my buddy Jerry Placken and I used to spend hours, and hours, and hours hanging in his room (which had an amazing homemade sound system), and pick apart every record in our collection. Of course, we were listening to the performances, and the arrangements, and the sounds, but mostly we were picking apart the mixes, the way a saxophone player listens to and transcribes a jazz solo.

We listened to every aspect of these records: the drum sounds, the vocal sound, the position of the backgrounds, and placement of each percussion and keyboard instrument. The bass sound, and EQ of the bass, the relationship between the kick drum and the bass. We were obsessed. We were also fanboys of the best mixers in the game: Bob Clearmountain (Roxy Music, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie), Geoff Emerick (the Beatles), Glyn Johns (Led Zeppelin), George Massenburg (Earth, Wind & Fire), Bruce Swedien (Michael Jackson). Though mixing is an obscure artform that very few people outside the business know of, it was our obsession, and these guys were some of our heroes.

Mixing is an esoteric practice that involves listening to all the sounds in a production and carefully placing them in a three-dimensional space that eventually becomes the stereo mix that you hear in your iTunes collection or radio station.

There are distinct elements to mixing. They are identified as a selection of processes that you can apply to sound. This is not an exhaustive list, but it is the one that I used back in the day when I was running my Elements of Mixing seminars. They are volume, pan, EQ, compression, distortion, saturation, delay, reverb, modulation, and time compression/expansion. All of these techniques bring out a particular part of a sound or obscure it, depending on what the goal is. I will discuss all these processes in greater detail in future posts.

I have always thought of mixing as a bit like musical chairs, the game we all played as grade schoolers. Mixing is often the job of packing an extraordinary amount of information into one space. Once you become a bit further on in the mix process, simply pulling back one thing, like the background vocals or a keyboard part, will open up a whole new balance in the mix as the musical chairs again fill up. Each part in the mix is always vying for visibility. The important questions are what do you feature and what do you obscure?

Truth be told, everything is important: the drums , the bassline, keyboards, strings, horns, guitars, and percussion are all important. But, nothing is more important than the lead vocal (in my humble opinion). The lead vocal is the holy grail of recording, and mostly the reason we go into the studio to record; to create wallpaper to go behind the vocalist. It’s also how most of us make a living. This is not, of course, true for instrumental music — but for the time being we’re talking about pop records with singers. I have read interviews with many famous mixers who build their mix around the lead vocal. I share that philosophy and have always made the vocal the focus of my mixes. There are many rule-based philosophies about where to place the vocal, and they often fall in to styles of a time, and genre of music. Most ‘70s and ‘80s rock, for example, tend to feature the guitars and a massive drum sound, while de-emphasizing the bass and vocals. In many great rock mixes, the beat and the guitars drive the attention and the vocal sits neatly tucked away inside the mix. In some pop and R&B, as well as rap, the vocal is king. Many listeners get “goose bumps” when they hear a particularly compelling performance from a diva like Aretha Franklin, or Whitney Houston, or Adele. Every bit of the gravel and breath and tiny bits of ad-lib have been meticulously manicured to make it easy for the listener to identify (and connect with) what the singer is doing.

 

 

 

I would say making the artist, producer, mixer or listener have goose bumps is pretty much job number one. Goose bumps are what typically happen to people on their arms when they connect in a particularly emotional way to a moment of a song. It can be enhanced by a brilliant string arrangement, or a particular dramatic break in the song which exposes the lead vocal by itself. Like the lead actor in a film, the lead vocal is typically the focus on a pop record. It’s all about engaging the listener and creating an emotional connection with them. If the producer has done his/her job, and the singer has performed admirably, and the mixer brings out all that is special in the performance, then you might just have a hit record. I’ve had a few, and I always knew it was a hit before it left the studio. Why? Because I got goose bumps.

Puff Daddy, who was one of my earliest and long-standing clients, often used to look at my arms to see if I got the bumps. The right arm was R&B and the left was pop, and if they both lit up, it was a cross-over smash. Music is all about emotion, and collecting it and bottling it properly can make a lot of money.
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