How to listen and make mix notes that get results

helping you help me...help you

Getting a mix that achieves your goals and vision for the song is a collaborative process.  I do everything I can to understand the artist's vision before I begin the first mix, but there is usually still room for fine tuning, and that’s why we do a revision process.

There’s a list of guidelines and procedures I ask my clients to use when listening to their mixes and preparing notes for me.  After a few times typing it all out, I had the brilliant idea (or someone near me did) to save it all so it can be simply passed to clients when they needed it. Now I’ve finally had the common sense to make it part of my website so my clients —and anyone else— can refer to it.  

Take Notes:  

Write your thoughts down as you’re listening! Memory is very shaky, and we don’t want to leave anything to chance. You can edit the notes later, so write it all down as you go.  Use a notepad, voice memo, or a note app; use whatever you like best.

Listen on Multiple Speaker Systems:

If you make notes based on just hearing the song on your laptop or phone speaker, you’re not getting anywhere near the full picture, and your notes will reflect that.
Listen on the systems through which you’re most familiar hearing music. These could be earbuds, headphones, a car stereo, or a home stereo.  Maybe the phone speaker, too; just be sure to listen in many places to get a good idea of how the song sounds to everyone around the world.  

Listen at Different Volumes:

Our ears hear differently at different volumes. So after the initial excitement of having that first mix to listen to pushes you to crank things up, pull it back and see what pops out at quieter volumes.  Does the vocal get lost?  Does the energy stay up when it’s quiet?  Is it too harsh when I crank up the speakers?  Sometimes we listen to music in the background and other times it’s cranked up so we can sing along.  This will give you yet another perspective, and you may revise your notes.

Put the Song in a Playlist:

A great way to hear the song the way your fans will is to sandwich it in a playlist with similar music to see how the song feels in a shuffle.  Your mix doesn’t need to match so exactly that its unique character is lost, but you want to know how it fits next to other music. How will it grab the listener, and how will it blend?

Get the Opinion of People you Trust:

If you have bandmates, that’s obvious, but even if you are solo, it’s good to keep perspective.  Find people whom you trust (they probably need to have similar taste in music).  Make sure they’re also listening on real speakers and —this is important— don’t prompt them!  Get their feelings on the song without priming them to pay attention to something you’ve already written down. Ask them how it makes them feel.  Is there anything jarring about the song that stands out?  What do they love about the song?  You might be fixating on a small detail that 99% of listeners will never notice. By using this process to help you consider what they say weighed against your own feelings, you can stay on target to achieve an overall good mix, not just one that fits your own expectations. 

Organize your Notes:

By now, your notes might be a long list and might even have some conflicts or contradictions within it.  Edit the list to remove these conflicts (vocal up, and also vocal down, etc.), and organize them by instrument and time as much as possible. Read them out loud to yourself as a check to see if they make sense. A confusing sentence might go unnoticed when you write/type it, but will stand out when you read it out loud to yourself.

Don’t Panic!:

If, for some reason, you get that first mix back and it is way off from the creative vision that you have for the music, don’t despair! Just communicate that immediately in a professional manner.  I do my best to avoid this by communicating frequently before the first mix and through use of reference tracks, but a misunderstanding can still happen from time to time. It’s probably not hard to get things back on track.  It’s time to communicate more about the references, and/or change those references up if you think I've misunderstood something major.  

One more thing:

Keep in mind that the process of mixing is balancing.  Turning one instrument up is, essentially, the same thing as turning everything else down, and boosting the lows in the bass guitar might mean cutting some bass from other tracks to make room. What I do to turn your notes into a mix revision is to first interpret them in the context of the song and then to make a creative choice about how best to achieve the goal.  Sometimes that’s as easy as you saying, “turn the guitar solo up” and me doing just that.  Other times the guitar solo might be covered by some other tracks or effects and changing those is the best way to make the solo sound louder in the mix.  I let the context decide.

That’s it!
Taking good notes, varying your listening environment, getting alternate perspectives, and editing/organizing the notes for clarity and conflicts will make sure your mix revision gets results!

I had an interesting session recently for The Small Brain Curds, a four pice band featuring Motown and soul tunes.
They wanted to record a cappella arrangements of a few of their favorites. I thought the best way to approach this with a band that’s most used to playing in a room together is to record it the same way. All live, all at once. When thinking about the best mic technique for this I asked for advice from the great Slau, and of course, he came through with an idea I had never heard of and surely wouldn’t have thought of on my own.

I placed my pair of Cascade Fat Head II ribbons with the stereo bar as if setting up for blumlein in the center of the room. The figure eight patterns of each mic facing (almost) the corners of the room. 

(I say almost because we avoid facing the walls to reject reflections but directly pointing them at the corners could have its own problems. So just off from the corners is best) 

The performers stand facing each other like an X around the microphone array. Each mic hears two voices, one on each side, and the other two voices are in that mic’s rejection nodes. With careful listening the voices can be balanced by moving closer or farther away from the mics. This allows the performers to hear and see each other easily which is crucial to this sort of recording. Each singer was about 20 to 26 inches from the mic depending on how loud they were which turned out to be far enough to avoid any need for a pop screen and problems with the ribbon’s powerful proximity effect.This technique picks up quite a bit of room sound so I was glad I put so much into good acoustic treatment but I also hung up my blankets and gobos behind the singers to cut out even more. 

 Small Brain Curds recording at Railroad Avenue

You can see in the picture I placed my Rode NT2 in omni mode in the center of the pattern also. I recorded this to a third track with the idea that I might want to mix in some high end but the Fat Head II’s gave me everything I wanted so the track was muted in the mix.
The simple two tracks made the mix feel more like mastering. Some gentle multiband compression helped to even out the high and low octave voices.

Thanks to Slau for the great technique. Another tool to remember.

A final mix from the session…

on the list of basic, got-to-have-it gear for anyone wanting to make great recordings, is a well treated room. (or in my case, a live room and a control room!)  it’s the single best bang for your buck thing you can do to improve your recordings by making the source sound better in the first place.  i built my own broadband absorbers and diffusion panels, they came out great so i want to share what i did, what was good, and what could have been better.

most small rooms need absorbtion more than anything and that’s mostly what i did as well.  i researched quite a bit around the web for the best materials and methods.  i found a design for a wood framed fiberglass pannel that i made my own simplified version of.  the idea was to make the frame with another frame inside it, holding the chunk of insulation suspended with an air gap behind it.

but i like to tinker and modify things so i saw a way to simplify the construction while still getting great results!  here’s what i did:

my research found that rockwool is just as effective as owens corning 703 at absorbing sound and it’s cheaper!  the downside is it isn’t quite as easy to handle because it’s softer and tears if you’re not careful.  i had a good source for this stuff, in a friend who is a home builder.  it came in 4’ by 16” panels (3” thick) that’s because it’s used inside walls during construction for more sound resistant walls.  i got 2 bails of it, 24 pieces, for just $100.  i made simple frames from 1x2 pine board to the same dimensions as the insulation and stretched fabric across them like a canvas.  the piece of insulation sits on this “canvas” and another piece of fabric is wrapped over the top and it all get stapled together.  the 2” depth of the pine board is all behind the chunk of insulation so when it’s against a wall or ceiling it has that air gap behind it. (this air gap is very important as it increases the effective frequency band of your panels by letting the sound waves pass through partially absorbed, reflect off the wall, and pass through again.  it’s like adding free thickness to your panels!)  the fabric i chose was black burlap because it’s the cheapest i could get at about $2 a yard.  this design will hang on any screw, you can put hooks in them to hang in corners with picture wire, or even mount them right onto ceilings or doors with L brackets and screws as i did in a few places.  just make the frame to whatever size and shape your insulation pieces are, it’s quite simple.

i didn’t have the presence of mind to take any in process pictures when i made these panels over a year ago, sorry!  if anything needs clarification just ask.

i hung a few of these on the walls and corners of my live room and lots of them are on the walls, ceiling, and corners in my mixing room.  very effective, and inexpensive to make.  so after recording in my newly treated room a few times i felt like i wanted to liven up my room a little.  i was adding high eq to almost everything that was a distant mic.  but my room has parallel walls so i can’t just go taking down a few of my absorbers or i’ll get flutter echoes.  luckily for me the may/june 2011 issue of TapeOp magazine had an article by Brad Williams about building your own (inexpensive) QRD/BBC diffusors!  these are really expensive to buy ready made and the prime number equations for laying out the placement of the blocks is complex.  but this article has it all laid out like a paint by number.  the plans call for 2x2” wood studs and 18” sheets of plywood the glue them on to.  i love a project!

first choose the depth of the panels you want to make. deeper panels are effective down to lower frequencies.  i made mine with blocks 4, 3, 2, and 1 inches long for panels that are effective above about 1.7khz but doubling the length of those pieces to 8, 6, 4, and 2 inches will make panels that are effective down to about 850 hz.  the different lengths are laid out on the board according to the diagram in the magazine to create the uneven surface and scatter the sound waves as they reflect.

the shallow panels i chose require a little more than 3 eight foot studs to cut into the four different lengths for each diffusor.  i made four of them so my material cost was about $75.  so cheap compared to what you can buy from acoustic treatment manufacturers!  and the results are great looking, effective diffusors.

update!!  i found a web version of the instructions for how many pieces you need and where to put them here!  

so is this all worth it?  in the case of the absorbing panels i think it’s definitely yes!  low cost, not too much work and man are they effective.  the diffusors on the other hand? well, cutting those studs into the 4, 3, 2, and 1 inch pieces took about 2 hours on a table saw. (if i had a chop saw i could have sped this up a bit)  gluing the pieces to the plywood backing took about six hours.  and because i used knotty pine studs to save on material cost i decided to paint them black to match my absorbers.  they look great and add to the professional esthetic of the studio but i don’t think i can recommend this project to somebody unless you really get a kick out of doing things yourself like i do.  this took quite a few of my weekend off-hours when i could have gone to target or something and gotten a big book shelf, filled it with a shopping trip to a used book store for probably a bit less money than what i spent on these materials, and surely way less time.  these diffusors are obviously more effective than a book shelf, but how many hours and dollars more effective?  

i’m glad i made them, like i said: i love a good project, but i won’t be making any more!  

i hope this helps some of you decide what you want to build and how to do it!  any questions just ask!

and here are some photos of the the diffusors in process and a picture of them hanging on the wall of my live room next to one of my absorbers in the corner.

home made QRD/BBC diffusor in processhome made QRD/BBC diffusor finishedhome made QRD/BBC diffusors and absorber panel hanging