Josh Watson

0 The 3 Pillars of Mixing: Water, Cement, Human Souls.

Whisky is becoming the theme linking these blog entries. It’s nearly 1am and though I’m planning on going to bed soon, I’ve got a little remaining of the wee dram I poured myself earlier, so I might as well start this. Last week I said I was going to talk through a specific mix, I’ve changed my mind; that’d be boring.

Most of the terrible mixes I’ve ever heard in my life have been my own. Nobody can just sit down and mix something that sounds great, it takes a long time to develop your ears, brain and heart to be able to plunge yourself through a wall of sound and start tinkering in a way that, when you drag yourself back out of the ocean of noise, looks pretty good from a distance. The hardest thing is being able to zone your perspective in and out, to deal with the tiniest facet of the mix while also listening to the whole sound as it lurches from verse to chorus etc.

Ears, Brain and Heart.

There are no such things as “golden ears”. Unless you’re deaf, you can hear everything I can hear when I’m mixing. That little rattle of the snare that shouldn’t be there, that weird ringing sound on the backing vocals, the way the guitars are too loud in the verse and too quiet in the chorus, you can hear it too. But you might not know what you’re hearing. You’ll just know something doesn’t sound right, that the mix sounds weak. But you can train your ears to take sounds apart, to identify the components that make them – that the murky rattle is from the snare, that the ringing sound is a room resonance at a certain frequency that you can cut out.

Mixing is the hardest my brain has ever worked. It’s totally draining. A mixing session is never finished, only abandoned, and some of my sessions go on for 7 hours or more without a break. It’s like a full day’s work except I’m concentrating! They say you’re better off taking 5 minutes to get a drink and refresh yourself, but when I’m in the room, in the sounds, I don’t want to stop. It’s all in my head; I’ll lose it if I don’t keep it there. There’s so much to remember, the mix becomes like a taxi driver’s mental road map – the bits of takes you want to bring forward, the bits you want to bury, the fact you want the backing vocals to lean towards the left of the mix to counter the tambourine that comes in halfway through the second bridge, the reverb that’s adding ambience EXCEPT for 15 seconds in the solo because you want it to stand out stark naked in that section… once you forget the details, the mix becomes cloudy, you don’t know where things are happening, why something sounds the way it does, and the whole thing runs away from you.

The Heart. It keeps my blood flowing, but we’re talking heart in the old school artsy sense – emotions, feeling. Mixing can too easily become a technical endeavour, a soulless process of making sure everything can be heard. But mixing is fucking art, man. As much art as songwriting, as performing, as painting, and much much more than interpretive dance. The mix has to move you. If you’re not jiggling in your seat, occasionally realising something awesome is happening right in front of you in the air between the speakers, give up; you’re juggling shit. What you’re doing is totally magical. You’re manipulating vibrations in the air, making the atoms around you dance with some higher purpose. You are to the music as God is to the universe. Whether or not you think God exists as some entity is totally irrelevant here, you’re him and your creation is noise.

It’s your ears that tell you where you are, your heart that tells you where you need to go, and your brain that figures out how to get there. I have some very clever friends who have tried to work out why music evolved when it doesn’t help us at all in the game of survival and reproduction. I don’t know, but empathy plays a big part in it – communication, understanding, society. It’s almost telepathy. Music is a cry. Maybe a cry for help, for understanding, for action, but if you write from your heart, then people will hear who you are. It’s no accident that we empathise with musicians we enjoy, that we use phrases like “sings with soul” or “wears his heart on his sleeve”. We understand them because they’ve taken who they are, and written it right into your brain, made your synapses fire just the way they want them to, to get you to understand. Sometimes, when music hits you totally, the hairs on your neck stand up and the shiver goes down your spine, I think you become the person who wrote it.

This is the power of music.

0 Shake well before serving. Part 1

Mixing Part 1: The tools.

There are a number of ways to skin a cat. The same can be said of mixing. Both will leave you with blood on your hands and a very upset girlfriend. But not for the same reason. Mixing leaves you open to accusations of not having any time for your loved one, and always having the thousand yard stare of a war veteran. Skinning your girlfriend’s cat leaves you open to accusations of horrible brutality.

Luckily I’ve only went down one of those paths. So without further ado here is my guide to flaying domesticated mammals:

Only kidding. We’re talking about mixing here. More specifically, the tools that get it done. But you’re going to need to pay attention and if you don’t understand what I’m saying, ask or you’ll have to repeat the class.

Mixing is literally that: taking more than one sound and mixing them together. But if that were the end of it I suspect it wouldn’t be a thing at all any more than opening the drawer to get a teabag is a named part of “making a cup of tea”. As it is, for a mix to sound good it has to fulfil some very difficult criteria. It has to be clear in its intent. It has to generally have a balanced spectral content: that is the relative amount of low frequencies and high frequencies. Too much or too little of any frequency range makes the mix sound amateurish. Most of all it has to be true to the intention of the song. It has to somehow evoke the dynamic contrasts between sections, the tension and release of parts, and the balance of instruments as the musicians intended. It doesn’t have to be based on reality, but it does have to make you believe it’s happening. We all know a human voice isn’t as loud as a drum kit or cranked guitar amp, but when we hear songs we don’t care because it’s made to sound believable.

Each part that I’ve recorded gets its own track. Some parts get more than one track if I’ve used more than one mic, as mentioned in previous instalments of “Josh drinks whisky and talks about recording”. Each of these tracks can be raised or lowered in volume, and panned anywhere between the left and right speaker, like so: (turn up your speakers so you can clearly hear what I’m doing!)

01 Levels and panning by Cirrusband

Mixes tend to need more than just those volume and panning adjustments to sound good, though, unless it’s a simple mix or has been recorded in the most expert way imaginable. And I promise I’ve not done that. Mixes also have to cater for the deficiencies of the human ear. We think it’s a great organ, and in some ways it is – I’ve read that if it were much more sensitive we’d actually be able to hear the effect of air molecules vibrating against it in Brownian motion. So in some ways it’s as high fidelity as it’s possible to be in air. It can detect an incredible range of frequencies and process them into something we understand as sound rather than just a bunch of vibrations in the fluid that surrounds us (yep, air is a fluid!).

But ears are also totally shit. Like, f*cking blind to sound.

If you’re listening to an instrument that has lots of bass, and there’s another instrument that also has lots of bass but is quieter, you probably won’t hear the bass from the other instrument at all. You’ll just hear a muddy noise that gets in the way of you being able to hear what’s happening. This masking happens in time too. A loud sound will mask a quiet sound even if the quiet sound happens a split second before the loud sound. The result of this masking is audio confusion: Instruments that should by rights sound clear, that sound great on their own, will somehow vanish without a trace into the mix, leaving only a sense of congestion and lack of clarity.

But we have tools to combat this. Clever little tools. The most powerful of these is the EQ (short for equalisation). It’s one of the first effects they ever made, because they needed it. With EQ we can filter out frequencies we don’t want to hear or wouldn’t hear anyway, add frequencies where there are gaps in the mix to help a sound cut through, get rid of bad sounds and emphasise good ones. Sometimes I think of mixing as being like trying to push a bunch of big plasticine shapes onto a little pane of glass, and having to somehow change the shapes to make them all fit while still keeping them recognisable. Sorry if that’s a stupid analogy, I genuinely imagine this when I’m mixing!

02 EQ by Cirrusband

The next most powerful tool is compression. It’s a mysterious tool that takes years to understand, let alone master. At its most simple, it compresses the volume range of whatever you put into it – the loud and quiet bits come out more even in volume than they were before. This is handy. A good live band can go from whisper quiet to roaring, and that sounds great live but it wouldn’t work on a recording as you drive along in your car or listen on the bus: Make it loud enough to hear the quiet bits and the loud bits would destroy you, make it quiet enough that the loud bits are fine and you wouldn’t hear the quiet bits. Almost all recordings, even classical ones, have compression for this reason. And used sparingly, we don’t even notice, because we expect to hear the loud and quiet bits clearly and our ears actually compress by themselves at high volumes.

Compression has more tricks to reveal. Weird little controls labelled “attack” and “release”. What do they do? Attack tells the compressor how long it should wait after it hears a loud sound before it actually reduces the volume of the loud bit. So if you set it to a second, the first second of any loud sound gets through unaffected before the compressor cottons on to you and ducks the volume down. In practice, a second is too long. Reduce it to between 20 and 60 milliseconds or so and you get this great loud and punchy spike at the beginning of each loud part, but then the compressor kicks in and keeps the rest of the volume manageable. That initial loud spike grabs the attention of your ear and makes them think “Oh! A loud bit! This is cool.” Except it’s not actually loud for the rest of the time. It’s just a trick.

The release knob tells the compressor how long after it’s stopped hearing a loud sound it should wait before it stops clamping down on the volume. This knob is really difficult to get right, mainly because even after years of mixing I often can’t tell the difference. But sometimes I can, and there’s usually a setting that “feels” good even if I couldn’t tell you exactly why I prefer it. But for a simple example, imagine Drummer boy is hitting the bass drum 4 times a second. If I set the release to more than a quarter of a second, the compressor isn’t releasing its grip on the volume by the time the next bass drum hit happens, so it will never give me the punchy attack I want: it’s operating too slowly.

Compression is hard to get your head around, Again, turn this up and you’ll hear what’s happening better:

03 Compression by Cirrusband

Really, EQ and compression are the two most powerful mix tools you’ve got – you can shape the sounds hugely with these two, and mixes have been done without anything else. There are other effects that can get pretty fun. Reverb is one, echo is another. Reverb is important – without it the sound is dead, and has no context. We’re not used to hearing no reverb. The first time I stood in a totally dead sounding room was the weirdest thing I’ve experienced. People next to me sounded 10 meters away, yet I could hear the slightest whoosh of air from a closing door. Or a sphincter. No hiding in there.

So, those are the most important tools. Next week, I’ll talk through the actual mixing of one of the songs on the EP.

Hold on to your cats, it might be a wild ride.

0 You are a spark, shining in the darkness.

Vocals should be easy to record. One microphone, sing into it, bam.
That’s actually pretty much how it goes, from a technical point of view. On the first vocal session we tried out four mics, picked the best one, and put the rest away.

The bit that isn’t technical or easy is the performance. Vocals need to be as convincing as they are well executed – when we listen to music, we have a whole section of our brain dedicated just to listening to voices. And not just listening – we judge those voices based on timbre, pitch and delivery, even before we get into what’s actually being said.

It’s harder to get it right in the studio than a live show. Watching a live vocalist brings the rest of your critical brain into play too, watching the expressions on the singer’s face and the way they move to the music. With our singer it’s quite easy to tell that yes, he’s into it, and yes, it’s moving him. He sings from the heart. The fact he’s grabbed YOU by the cheeks and is trying to sing straight into your soul is a clue.
On record, all we have is a voice. That voice is the most important thing on the record, because it has to reach through time and space and move you, the listener. And that voice is naked. You can hear any wavering notes, any off key moments, and you will hear them because your brain will draw them to your attention – “HERE! HERE IS A WEAKNESS!” I promise you, if the singer is going through the motions, you’ll be able to tell. How can you be moved by a recording of someone who isn’t feeling moved?

Our singer is called Whitty. I’ve never met anyone even remotely like him before.

My favourite ever Whitty recording moment came during the recording of our last EP – Whitty had his first go of opening track “Poker” and it was pretty good, but didn’t quite have the attitude. Chris, the recording guy, told him to give it some more bollocks. Whitty took his trousers off for the next take. He was literally hanging it all out there for the world to see, but for the slight obscuration by speakers, a bunch of wire, and a mic.

He delivered that vocal to us.

The man takes it seriously. He gets pumped up. He stretches. He does his best at times to be insufferable because he knows it’s a performance just like any other. His worst takes would shame most people.

With a strong vocalist like Whitty there are two main things to be judging in each vocal take, and I try to keep them in my mind as I’m choosing vocal takes, cutting lines and phrases, looking for the perfect vocal.

Pitch and attitude.

It’s natural that when singers get excited, go for the high notes, or try to create tension, they’ll place parts of their melodies slightly out of tune. It’s not bad or wrong, it’s one of the ways a good vocalist expresses himself and sounds human. It’s the reason I hate autotune – remove these “mistakes” and you remove the soul.

Sometimes you’ll have a part that is sung to perfection in one take, and with complete attitude and conviction in another take even if the pitching isn’t as good. You’ve got to decide which one is better, leaning as far as you can into the realm of soul and guttural truth without sounding like a wild pack of dogs barking into the night.

I like to think that me and Whitty are two people balancing each other on the line between genius and madness, but I’m never quite sure who’s on which side.