What is mixing?

0:00 What up? What up? This is Scoobert Doobert. And today we're going to talk about mixing on music 101.All right, so what's up with mixing? What does this even mean? What does this word? Basically the reasonwhy I talked about all of those different recording engineering slash production topics wasto lead us to this. Mixing is the thing that pulls it all together.

0:23 So think of recording and then production as you're creating this arrangement. You're creating the color palettes. You're creatingthe parts, you're creating the notes, the instrument decisions, and you're kind of putting it allinto the pot. Mixing is the point where you're actually mixing that pot and turning it into soup.

0:39 Without the mixing, everything is to just kind of like their own little distinct parts. So mixingtakes us back to what we've been talking about this whole time. The three major categories of audioand music in particular. You have your frequencies, your pitches, your frequencies. You have your

0:58 dynamics. So loudness, quietness, and then you have your time-based effects and the fact that we have twoears. So stereo, slash, spatial audio, all of these are just basically tools that we can use tocreate something called space. So what is space?

1:16 With mixing, I like to focus on two things at once, the entire mix, the lead vocal, and then the low end. So let's start with the lead vocal. So likeit's specifically in pop music and this can apply to like really anything, even if it's aninstrumental music.

1:30 The main thing that you need to focus on, the thing that's gonna be stuck in your head, the catchy part, be it a violin or a tenor sax or a vocalist, usually a vocalist. Sometimesan electric guitar will come in and take a solo or whatever. That thing, I like to leave that thingon the entire time because that's what I'm trying to frame with everything else.

1:50 And mixing one of my mentors described to me is like painting or photography where you have a foreground and you have abackground. And you want to use things like depth and blurriness to create more focus on thething that you want the listener to focus on.

2:04 So that's why I leave the lead vocal unmuted themajority of the time regardless of what I'm working on because I have to hear how everything's playing against that lead vocal. Because if I'm bearing that lead vocal, I'm losing the pointin most genres. Sometimes that's cool. Anyway, everything is relative to each other.

2:23 So when we have a mix, just like I talked about before, it's like a balloon. You can only put so much air into thatballoon before it explodes. Mixing is the same thing. There's only so much room. And so everythingin terms of loudness and in terms of presence that that focus is in relative to each other.

2:42 And sowhen I'm having that lead vocal open, it's so that I can hear how it's reacting to every other part that I put in. And mixing is fascinating because every time you put something else in,it affects everything else. Let me say that again. Every time you add another instrument into your mix,every other instrument sounds different. And that's because of a few different things.

3:04 It's because it was really those three based effects. So one, frequencies. Like I said, there is no such thingas a perfect frequency unless it's like a synthesizer that you're really trying to make that happenvery rarely. Even if you're using a synthesizer, you're trying to pull out these complex harmonicsbecause it sounds good to our ears. So nothing is just one frequency. It's a series of frequencies.

3:26 And so when you add something, you're adding not just the one note. You're adding all of the frequencies,the timbre that comes from that one note. And those frequencies step on each other. And they canamplify each other or reduce each other. And like you can think of this like waves. So if you havea wave that is going up, down, up, down, up, down.

3:48 And you flip it perfectly, down, up, down, up, down, up. You don't hear anything. That's how those noise canceling headphones work. So it actuallyhas a microphone listening to what's going on in the outside world. It's phase flipping it into yourears so that it's actually playing the audio back of what you're hearing around you. Opposite.

4:07 It's called phase cancellation. And so that's what happens when we add new frequencies is that you canhave things that are amplifying the waves like piggybacking on it and making it bigger like the moontugging the sea. Or you can have the reverse phase cancellation just like those noise cancelingheadphones.

4:27 And so every time you're adding something in, you're listening to the way that it ripples the ripple effect from a frequency's perspective. Also, from a dynamics perspective,everything is running into a series of compressors.

4:39 We talked about compressors earlier,but basically what those are is it's taking the audio and every time it gets a little too loud, it tugs it back a little bit. It's a little quieter. And it's not actually that simple. Most of thecompressors that we use at least are modeled off of like physical analog gear.

4:57 And we're doing a digital version. Most engineers at this point. They're like, what that's doing is it's not justcompressing the audio. It's changing the way that it sounds once it hits that certain leveland it actually engages the compressor compressing down the volume. And so every time it's compressingdown the volume, it's changing the frequencies a little bit.

5:16 It's adding something called saturation, which sometimes which is the harmonic effect that I talked about super early on in the podcast,where like we're saying no notice on its own. It has all these harmonies harmonics that

5:32 extend from it. And when you're compressing things, you tend to saturate things. And saturationis bringing out those other harmonics. And so there's a lot going on between those two things.

5:43 And when we only had mono mixing, so like if you listen to like a mono version of Sergeant Pepper's, which is how it was originally mixed and recorded, there's there is no room to spreadthings out between your two ears called stereo.

5:58 And that brings me to the third thing time.So we can create the effect of putting things around your head and even more so now that we have binaural and spatial audio and stuff like that. And that creates space. That's my primary reasonto pull from panning is excitement and space. It's less about like sound effects. It's more aboutI have this lead vocal.

6:21 If I put that right in front of your face, if I put more things right in front of your face, it's going to cloud the lead vocal more sothan if I put them into your two ears further away.

6:32 And so there's like this, you can picturelike a 360 field around your head and where you place things is going to step on each other.In the same way that if like the guitarist and the drummer were standing on each other's shoulders, it's going to be like a little bit more cloudy than having the guitarist to your leftand the drummer to your right. Same basic concept. And that's like what we maneuver with mixing.

6:56 Now the elephant in the room, the main other thing that I like to get done first and thebiggest pain in the ass if it has to change later, which it so frequently does when you'reworking with other mixing clients.

7:09 And I'm also telling you this as a mixing engineer, be mindfulwhen you're working with a mixing engineer changing the lead vocal drastically changes everything might as well be a new mix. The other thing that changes drastically is the low end.

7:22 So I'm talkingbass guitarist, kick drums, anything that's living down in the basement of frequencies, the stuff that hits the subwoofer that rumbles your house. Subs take up the most room in a mix. So what I mean bythat, it means like if you turn on and off the sub, everything else changes the saturation ofthe entire mix, the compression and the entire mix, the frequency spectrum.

7:45 The lower you go, the more harmonic frequencies there are. When you play a low bass note, there are going to be moreseries of frequencies going up and up and up and up, then if you played like a really high upguitar note. And part of this is not actually because of nature, part of it's just because of howour ears hear.

8:05 So at a certain point, those harmonic frequencies, they kind of peter out because we're not really built to hear these things. When you hear a really low rumble like a monster cominginto a cave, that means danger. We're tuned into that.

8:22 And so we have this certain sensibility withjust with our ears and our nature, low notes take on a lot of space when you're piling things on top of them. So that's what I like to do first. Get the lows sounding great. Take away lows fromanything that doesn't need it. Just like I was saying, the first one, control your lows, controlyour highs. That's step one of mixing.

8:42 I honestly think that step one of recording pick what's going down there and what's not because the more things you have going down there,the more things that we're going to create trouble for you have a really clean low end. See ifyou can pick one or two instruments that's dealing with that down there.

8:59 If you want to stack more, you start getting into like a really dangerous and difficult space, not saying that it can't bedone. I've done it. But to mix the facts, sometimes when you're talking low end to me,simpler, the better as pure as possible way down there. And then you build the rest of the mixfrom that because now you have a low end established and then you have your focal point established.

9:20 And then everything else as much as I like that hurts me sometimes as a primarily as a guitarist,that's where I started. The guitars are window dressing. They always have been. They're noteverything else is to support what the low end is doing, what the vocal is doing.

9:39 To me,I like to get the drums going in the vocal because to me, it goes basically in order vocal, low end drums, everything else in terms of priority. Obviously, everybody can have their ownopinions on this. This is my own thing though. It's not because of personal feelings. It's justbecause of doing this a lot. It works. That's the formula.

10:03 It works when you have that order of priority. Because then what you're doing is you're creating a focal point. You're creating sizeand depth with that hitting that sub over and then you're creating groove and then you're creatinginterest in that order. If you create interest first, then you lose the point.

10:22 Now it's just like vibe but there's no real grounding to it. There's no low end like taking me and rooting me. Ifyou're focusing on vibe more than the vocal, it creates a genre choice. That's basically what I'mtrying to say. If you're trying to make shoegaze, make shoegaze. That's good. If you're trying to makepunk, make punk, that's good. If you're trying to make pop music, this is the formula.

10:45 Leave vocal, low end, groove, everything else. Then what do we actually do? We're basicallytake those things, build that groove. Then we try and get everything working together. Again,if you want to make something sound louder, you don't really have that much room to actually makethings louder in a mix. Everything is relative to each other.

11:06 One of the best ways to make something sound louder is to make other things sound quieter and all of a sudden that thing sounds louder.You're playing with psychoacoustic effects in mixing. One of the ways that you create space,well, there are three ways to create space. Same thing that I keep talking about over and over andover again. You cut something, the frequency spectrum to create space.

11:27 You compress something differently so that one thing is hitting the compressor or not hitting the compressor. Let me givean example of that. I like to compress my kick drum and my kick drum with my entire drum kitand the entire drum kit with my bass guitar. Then sometimes, depending on the arrangement,I'll compress all of the instruments and then I'll have the vocal not compressed.

11:50 Then the vocal is just sitting on top. It can sound a little weird, so sometimes I'll do another compressor,compressing everything again. Basically, what that's doing is it's saying the compressor that dynamiceffect that's pulling down the loudness is only affecting the non-focal points of the song.

12:11 There, it's affecting the way that the groove is compressing and contracting and growing andsaturating. Then the vocal is just sitting on top of it. That's how you use that second one.Then the third, talking about panning and also let's talk about reverb and delay.

12:28 There is more than just three dimensions around your head in terms of panning. You can putsomething in front of you, behind you, above you, to the left or right of you, the magic ofbinaural stuff. That's cool. You do lose something when you put it behind you. Just want to know that

12:46 because not every sound source is going to sound the same. When you're doing like theselittle tricky things, sometimes you're sacrificing something else, but I digress. Don't overuse it.Kind of what I'm trying to say. I've tried. It just doesn't really work. At least not yet. Anyway,so yeah, you have panning. You can put things around your head.

13:03 Then you also have the depth that's created by these artificial rooms. Again, we talked about reverb. Artificial reverb, reverberation,artificial rooms is all built about the delays, the sum of delays in a room. It's like right now,I'm in a fairly small room, but it has pretty high ceilings.

13:22 You might be hearing a little bit of slapback from that. If you put yourself in a room and you don't put anything else in a room,that one thing that you put into the room is going to sound farther away by nature because it'sin a bigger space.

13:39 If you like, say, for example, if you were miking a drum kit or in one of my favorite cases, a ride cymbal, it's the big, big old cymbal that's like a really washy andlike what I say by Ray Charles that has a cool ride pattern.

13:58 Anyway, one of the coolest things that you can do because a big washy, loud, cutting cymbal is to make it really far away and then pullthat in. So then it sounds like the ride cymbal is like a mile away and dropping that into a mixcreates this real sense of depth and space.

14:16 And it makes that thing less focused, which can be really cool. It's like this Jack Garrett does this a lot. It's this off otherworldly thing thatisn't distracting from your vocal because it can be really cutting and harsh by putting it furtheraway.

14:31 That almost goes back to the beginning of recording engineering when you only had one microphone and everybody was just stacked in terms of distance. The lead vocalist was close to the microphone,drummer was way off in the distance and that was it. But it creates a frequency effect too whenthings are farther closer away from microphone and they call it proximity effect.

14:53 They're basically like the farther or farther away that you get the microphone actually picks up different things.And even though I'm speaking louder, it sounds a little bit differently when I come up closer andyou hear more of like the chest part of my voice the low end. Anyway, but basically what I'm tryingto say is you can affect the relative size of things and the relative focus of things by the room.

15:19 That you place them in either virtually or physically. That's about it. There's not really anythingelse going on. There's effects. We'll talk about that in a later pod. There's plenty of nuancethat we can get into but that's the gist. Mixing is pulling everything together, putting it allon the pot and everything is in relation to each other.

15:42 You can't just keep throwing spices in not everything can be louder sort of. There are some ways around that but the gist is that everythingis in relation to each other. So when you're mixing, think more about cutting than hyping and usesaturation liberally. I want to talk about that in the next pod.

16:05 I'm going to name it like the hilariously clip bait, click baity title like five things I wish I knew about mixing or something likethat.

16:17 I'm going to talk about why people that are uncomfortable with mixing kind of turn it into this dark art and end up cutting themselves at the legs.

16:31 There are ways to build an effectivesession for a mixing engineer, even if you're not doing your own mixing by understanding where their heads are at and giving them a proper blueprint rather than just giving them a bunch and makeit audio and saying make it sound good.

16:51 Mixing needs to be the final stage of the process where everything gets brighter and cleaner and and have more depth and more focus and more size. It's notnecessarily the place you want to be making bold creative decisions.

17:06 Make that before the mix.Let the mixing engineer do what they do in terms of making finalizing that soup rather than saying hey mixing engineer please pick all of the reverbs. You kidding me you want me to pick all the reverbs?That's the producers job in my opinion.

17:24 The space that you put something in that's insanely vital to genre decisions. Like why would you have the mixing engineer choose what genre your song is goingto be? Sure you can give reference tracks and stuff like that but let me talk about that in thenext part. Reference tracks are inherently flawed because you're not making a cover song.

17:44 It's not the same song. Yeah you can do things like give vibe I get that. That's important but fundamentalyou're making a unique distinct piece of music do that and be confident enough in your own creativedecision making to make those decisions before the mixing engineer left the mixing engineer do mixingrather than producing you need to produce or your producer needs to produce and then you mix

18:09 separate them and you can mix along the way I'll talk about that too but like don't don't expectthe mixing engineer to have to make these super creative decisions because it's going to get in theway of the fundamental task of making the soup actually taste good making this stuff work togetherthat's mixing it's not it's not saying I want to write a new core progression it's like dude you

18:33 should have done that before you even went to the mix like don't don't mess with their time becauseit's going to get in the way of the the actual goal here so yeah that's that's about it we'll do thisone one next next week about like the five things and then that's going to be like this little

18:52 mixing recording engineering section and then we'll you know let's talk about something else I'vegot infinite things to talk about and also fun little fun little thing I get to announce nowI'm getting my first major label cut for mixing job and production and engineering andplaying on it a bunch of different instruments for a band called CHAI, C-H-A-I they're from Japan

19:18 and it's going to be released on Sony Japan as well as I believe sub pop in the United States so

19:24 pretty stoked and I hopefully that makes all of this stuff have a little bit more weight now that I'veyou know had somebody else's name behind mine because that's that's like kind of how it works rightI guess like suddenly when when you have big brands vouching for you suddenly you're real rather thanjust the the work itself it's funny how that is but it's the same thing with you know surfing or

19:48 whatever once you're sponsored by Hurley and your legit I guess so but I'm excited about it notto throw shade I really love Chai I love their music and I'm so excited for that to come out so inJanuary my first production and mixing song with them is going to come out as a theme song for aJapanese TV show and then in February one of my remixes is going to come out I think February

20:12 second and then beyond that maybe some more surprises but nothing to say yet anyway thanks forlistening this is Scoobert Doobert and you can find all the links at Scoobert Doobert dot pizza that scoobertdoobert.pizza thanks yes bye