When to Mix in Mono (Dogma in Music)

0:02 What's good, everybody?It's Scoobert Doobert here.I wanted to talk about what I talked aboutin my last solo pod a little bit,and that's mono mixingand the values and negativesof kind of thinking in that way.I realize I might have been a little harsh.Mono mixing certainly has a ton of merit,but I want you to free yourself from dogma.Get out of the dogma.There are so many things with music

0:48 that hurt progress just because we've always done it that way.And so this podcast I want to talk about two things.Number one, the values and negativesof some of those sacred cows,and then also ways to use those constructivelyto give yourself a framework to work within,but not a framework you work for.So first off, mono mixing.This is like my favorite mixing engineerand a guy that I have had the pleasure

1:20 of being in the studio with and learning from,like literally sitting next to him.One, just the tool of us mixing stuffis Derek Ali, MixedByAli,who is one of the greatest mixing engineersof my generation.He's a little bit older than me.Maybe fourish years,but that's the sweet spot.It's the same thing like Louis Cole,he's like, I don't know, six years older or something like that.

1:48 Those people are like my people that I'm chasing.They're the giants that I'm trying to scramble up their shouldersso I can stand on them.But the thing that I learned from himwas that he loves starting his mixes in mono.But he says that versus seeing him do it.And I think this is where the misconception beginswith mono mixing.Old school mentality is like Beatles Sergeant Pepper.It's not real unless it's in mono,

2:27 which I agree with or pet sounds.It's not real unless it's in monobecause those are the things the artist actually approved.Those are the things that the producer cared about.That's what they sat down and listened to.I agree.Second thing, when you mix in mono,there's a lot less room to hide stuff.So mono, you know, everything is coming out of one speaker,a mono speaker rather than stereo, two speakers.

2:51 When everything's coming out of one speaker,stuff is muddy and ugly real fastbecause it's really easy to create clarityby throwing something into the other ear.You've probably noticed that on the stereo versionof Sergeant Pepper's or the stereo version of pet sounds.That kind of framework that thing that you're forcing yourselfinto makes you have to make EQ decisions

3:25 and compression decisions to create a frequency spectrumthat has got holes in itthat you're filling with the instrumentsrather than having a bunch of instrumentsthat are kind of clustered in the same area.That's all fair.There's value there.I check my mixes in mono too.But I don't start in mono and I don't end in mono.And the reason is that most stuff is listened to in stereo.And it's okay to have things reinforcing

3:58 or even fighting with each other between the two ears,just given how many people listen and headphones now.That's the medium of choice.Like I got that from David Byrne's book.And he's talking about compositionin the way that it changes over time.And the composition always fits the venuein which that composition is being performed.So if it's in a big church,there's gonna be a lot of languid long notes

4:20 that resonate and carry over each otherand sound sonorous as they're carried over each other.It's this very like, oh, kind of thing.And there's not a lot of crazy jazz chordsor key changes and stuffbecause all the notes are mushing over each other.It's very fluid.In headphones it's the exact opposite.You have so much hyperspecity.It's like being in the microphone,you're inside of the piano.

4:42 And to not use that is a crime.It's just like writing a bunch of key changesin your church music.You're not fitting to the strengthsof the primary means of performance.So I actually think that most mixes should be donein large part in headphones.And when you're doing that,you are taking away so much of like the ideaof mixing and mono.You're actually going the exact opposite direction.

5:20 But here's where I wanna specify.Because I think that I kind of like left the argument therewith my last solo part.But the strengths of mono are actually,I get a lot of that from comparing itto my Dolby Atmos certification.Atmos was really interestingbecause at first people were thinking,oh, I'm just gonna put the guitar over in the cornerand the bass over in the other corner

5:45 and the keyboards are gonna be on the roof.But what people are actually doing,and the really good sounding Dolby Atmos mixesand the stuff that I was trained on,is not like that at all.It's actually very similar to mono versus stereo mixing.You take your most important elementsand you mix them as you would in front of youlike you're looking at the stage.You have a little bit more specificity with panning

6:08 and stuff like that.But your primary elements,hit them right up the middle, kick drum, snare drum,vocal, high hat often.I usually pan high hat right in the center now.Create that glue of those,those are the three main elements in the bass.Those are the main elements of every track.Everything else is, and I say this as a guitarist.Like why am I saying this?The guitarist's like, the guitar is the spice

6:33 in most modern arrangements.That can float over your headbecause if it gets lost, whatever.If it's a little bit too quiet, whatever.You're not losing the punch and the grit of the song.And that's how I mix for mono versus stereois that I identify the elementsthat I'm okay with losing in 10% of the listening environments.Like a sparkly little guitar, tiny little fuzzy synthor a glitch part, whatever.

7:03 I'm gonna prioritize headphone listeningbecause that's where those things are gonna really speak.There are some things that I want you to feellike they're actually behind your head.I did a lot of that in KŌAN with binaural mixing and stuff.And that's part of the reason why I got Dolby Atmoscertified because I'm fascinated by that kind of stuff.But I want those elements to be their strongest,

7:23 but I don't want to sacrifice the song.I don't want it to be like speaking of bad stereo,the early Beatles stuff where the drum kit is all in one ear.And if your headphone goes bad,you can't experience the song ever again.That's kind of a bummer.Or the weird, fazzy stuff of a lot of modern musicthat they put the bass in stereoand then it gets really mushy and flubby.And then you play it in a club

7:54 and you can't make out anythingbecause the stereo subwoofer thing going onand then it all gets summed down to mono anyway.Keeping those things in mind.You want the song to stop punch and powerand that's where mono can really come inis identifying those punches and powers.But then for the ethereal things,the higher frequencies, usually higher frequencies,let them rip, make them wide, go crazy,

8:16 give them phase in between and whatever.Again, it's gonna be a little acquired in some roomsto turn it up and make those elementsproud and loud and make them all they want to be.So like using the dogma as a,there should be a minute, right?There's a reason why people say that.But they say that ad nauseam, they say it too muchand then people take it as the bible.It's the same thing like,

8:41 do we always want to roll everything off on the low end?So there's only kick and bass in the low end.Most of the time, yeah, but not all the time.You gotta make those decisions.Do we always want everything to be super clean?Like I was saying in that last little potter,do we want to leave a little bit of hiss?Make the decision.Hiss is cool.It's even cooler if you control it.

9:05 All right, the next thing that I want to talk aboutis how we can use frameworks to, like I was saying,work for us.And I just wrapped the mix that I was talking aboutin the last little pot.It's like a five song EP,a very experimental modern alternative music,pop music is cool.But what was fun doing thatand some of the hyper pop stuff that I've mixedor collaborated on or just my friend's stuff

9:32 is listening to how some of these elements are timeless.Like even just look at a drum kit.The drum kit is combining a bunchof marching band instruments,which are combining a bunch of different instrumentsfrom concert band, which are combining different thingsfrom the tribal music and folk music.The stuff like tambourines have been around forever.You know, these things are used for a reason.They work.

10:01 They fit certain frequenciesand they bring something out of the human soul.And yeah, you can use an electronic snare drum.You can use a kick drum and we just smack at a table.You know, like that's fine.Hope someone does.I hope someone samples that.But if you want to do whatever, you do whatever.But recognize that that sound is mimicking a kick drumor maybe not mimicking, it's the wrong word.

10:26 That's kind of what I'm actually trying to get away from.Saying instead, that sound is fulfilling the roleof the kick drum in the same way that a vocal clickcould fulfill the role of a snap or a snare drumor like a mouth thing could fulfill the role of a high hatand create groove or a tambourine.All these different things across the frequency spectrumthere's a reason why they're there.

10:51 There's a reason why we feel low and versus high.This is like psychoacoustics.It's built in.It is not just cultural.These things are humanand maybe they're hailing and too.Who knows?Maybe they're just matters of the universe.Long, slow waves versus high fast waves.I don't know.How would I know that?But what I'm trying to say is think about the rolesthat all these different arranging techniques

11:18 and mixing techniques are fulfilling.There's like a lot of things that have been figured outbecause recording has been around for 100 years plusover 100 years because I'm thinking like pop recording.And really it's the late 1950s or the 1960sthat a lot of these things start to coalesce.Like parallel compression and using and drivingpreamps intentionally to create saturation and distortion.

11:48 Like these things, they've been around.And so use them.Like I was talking on the last solo pod I was sayinglike how do you get more out of something?So it gets out of the uncanny valleyand pushes it up into either familiar or new.And a lot of the answer is just compressionand saturation and distortion and blending itand driving it in parallel.And like you can think of it from a analog board

12:16 or analog recording studio just in general.All of the different points where things hit transistorswhere they even hit wires.There's something being changed about the audiofrom it being in physical analog spaceas we know it without recording equipmentto analog space with recording equipmentand then you put it into your computer, right?But taking that same mindset and applying it

12:39 across the entire signal chain in your computerallows you to replicate that.Just slapping on one compressoror one distortion unit like a plug in or a pedalor whatever isn't gonna do it.You gotta do like 15 of them subtlyover the course of the whole thing.Like a fake one instance of a fake tape machinedoesn't do nearly enough.If you have a fake tape machine on the way in

13:04 as you're recording it inside of the individual trackinto the bus, into the master bus.Like okay, now there's four.Now we're talking.Now we've got the effect of a tapethat has gone through several generations.And that might be the sound that you're looking for.It's usually not always, but sometimes, you know,like thinking through that kind of logical progressionof I do this upstream, I do that downstream,

13:30 I do all this stuff in the middlerather than just one change, one delta.You have a sum of delta's that gets you that result.And being okay with it and mixing stuff.Driving something to the extreme,this is something that Derek Ali does all the time.Like drive something to the absolute maxand then mix it in.So instead of like doing something halfwayand having it mixed at 100%,

13:58 do something way beyond you would ever, ever wantat 100% and pull it down to 20.So you have this clean signal plus this gnarly awesome thingthat's pushing it to the front of the speakers.It's tickling your ears.It's the same thing with like the stereo field.Make decisions and don't make everything wide.You know, this is another dogma thing.I've actually had shade thrown at me by pros,

14:29 you know, old people about how wide I like to make things.But they've got their own things.They've got their dogma.They're stuck in it, sucks to be in them.But what I'm trying to say is don't make everything wide.That's what they think I'm saying.What I'm saying is you have 180,you know, really more than that,but you have 180 degrees, fill it.And decide what's gonna be at 100 and 80,

14:54 what's gonna be at 90, what's gonna be at zero.This whole left center right style of mixing.So I was in a mixing session with Alan Parsons,which was awesome.He's LCR.He likes to hand things all the way to the left,all the way to the right or down up the middle.Nothing in between.And you know what, it sounded like crap.Like it sounds really good when you're Alan Parsons and you're doing that kind of classic rock.

15:18 Like obviously, he made some of the arguably,probably actually the greatest albums of all time.Like, sorry to call out Alan Parsons,but the recording that I did with himdidn't sound very good because it was a modern songby Okudaxij, my buddy.I was playing guitar.It was a modern song.It didn't sound like a modern songbecause it was using this stupid old techniquethat old heads think sound really good.

15:41 And it has its reasons why it should.And it was all analog.And only on a mixing board, all this kind of stuff.But it's a disappointing record.It doesn't sound fresh.It doesn't hold, it doesn't use the tools.Use old tools to make an old sound.It's a bummer.Use old tools to make a new sound.Push them.Because that's how they were.It's really funny to see somebodythat's old go through the motions

16:04 when they came up reinventing the motions.Maybe that's my favorite eventually as well.But not right now.And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to, you know,preach that word is understand.Like yeah, LCR, there's value in that.Hard painting is great.I love hard painting.But understand you have this entire gradient.Use it, work with it.If you have two things that are fighting,hard pan them against each other

16:31 from one year to the next.You don't have to make them sound perfect in mono.But be damn sure that the kick, snare, hi-hat,vocals and bass sound pretty goodwhen there's some mono in most mixes.It's okay if not all.And so that's how you use the logical frameworks.Like, you know, I had a his track.It was just like sampled crazy his.And it was serving the function of an organ.So I put it into a Leslie organ.

16:59 And I didn't do 100% mix on a Leslie organbecause it sounded cheesy.But I planted it in.And then it gave the sense of like,I know why that hiss is there.I have something to latch onto as a listenerto jump off from.It's using the dogma as a launch pad rather than a cage.If you enjoyed this podcast,invite you to rate five stars, subscribe,stick around.And gonna have some great conversations coming up this year.

17:26 I'm really excited for you to hear them.If you'd like to hear my work, hear my crazy music,check out scoobertdoobert.pizza www.scoobertdoobert.pizzafor all my music.And I hope you're having a great year so farand making great progress on your New Year's resolutions.I'll be playing drums by the end of the year.I'm just gonna like my last podcast,which is be me playing drums.You'll be able to hold me to account.

17:53 All right guys, take it easy.Thanks for listening.