Brief Summary

DAWs and Plugins offer powerful control but should a mixer fix problems which are only apparent to the mixer rather than the listener?

Going Deeper

Andrew Scheps knows what he’s talking about and people looking for good advice should pay attention. There are lots of experienced engineers out there but Andrew has always been a favourite of ours because he communicates his experience so clearly, and so entertainingly.

One of the principal skills of any expert is the ability to make complicated things appear easy, that’s exactly what Andrew Scheps does in this video interview with GAS. Amongst the great advice, including his refreshingly direct views on “This weird Gain Staging thing” he shares a great piece of advice -Take care of problems where problems exist, don’t go looking for problems.

In these days of ultimate control over our audio, and a hyper competitive market for musicians and engineers this might sound like a lackadaisical approach. After all, if there is something wrong and you have the ability to fix it, as an engineer trying to be as good as you can be at your job it is your duty to fix it - isn’t it. Well possibly not.

Example - Room Mics And High Pass Filters

In the video Andrew references a record he mixed where, if he had taken the approach of preparing every track in the session in isolation, in solo, and had ‘fixed the problems’ he’d have high passed the drum room mics high enough to filter out the bass spill which was on them. It was spill. That bass guitar had no business being on a track intended to capture drums and a high pass filter would easily remove it, leaving the drums track sounding better.

However, as Andrew goes on to point out, in context with the rest of the track the bass bleed added something beneficial, with the bass bleed making the track sound “gigantic”. Had he done what so many people do and worh through the tracks in solo before bringing them together he would never have heard the bleed in context and heard how it helped the track. Here are more examples you might consider:

Staying Out Of Solo

Mixing the track as it will be heard is important, hearing the constituent parts in solo can be useful but is a perspective a listener will never hear, so don’t waste time listening to things which only might matter. Listen to the track. If you hear something in context which needs fixing, fix it. If using Solo helps fix it then great but only things which can be heard in the mix actually need fixing. And the question to be asked isn’t “is it correct?” but “is it good?” The two are related but not identical and as someone (I wish I could remeber who) once said “The music is in the rough edges”. So true!

Solo is addictive and if like me you’re a Pro Tools Ultimate user, consider using momentary solo mode. It changes the behaviour of your solo buttons to non-latching. If you’ve never tried the advanced solo modes check them out in the video below. But what other examples are there of occasions where it might serve the song better if we only took care of problems where problems exist rather than using the control and wealth of feedback a DAW and modern plugins give us.

Gating And Bleed

The classic case where being in solo creates the problem. The temptation to gate, expand or Strip Silence bleed out of existence because you can hear it in solo is something we must all have felt but in context that bleed probably doesn’t detract from the recording and in lots of cases it adds something irreplaceable. More and more I’m of the opinion that if bleed is so significant that you want to fix it it’s probably too prominent to be fixed without the cure being worse than the disease. Gentle expansion with a limited range, maybe as little as 6dB, and as slow an attack and release as you can get away with can help though. But is is better without?

Tuning and Quantize

So many performances have been ruined because of ‘off grid’ audio being fixed. this is a case where the genre of music carries different expectations and what is considered loose timing varies a lot with the expectations of the style but still the final arbiter of ‘tight enough’ is the ears, not the eyes,

The temptation to correct audio which might sound fine but doesn’t fall exactly on a grid applies to tuning as much as it does to timing and if your ear doesn’t pull at a vocal phrase then the tuning is probably fine. After all, people listening to music usually do so listening for what they like about it. not the converse.

Breaths And String Squeaks

Singers breath and guitarists have fingers. Both breaths and squeaks are part of the performance and unless you’re noticing them in context with the rest of the mix you should probably leave them alone. That isn’t to say that they won’t need attention though as compression can exaggerate them. While it might have been fine at the beginning of the mix, this might well change but sounds mask other sounds so always check with the rest of the track.

So am I suggesting that all the meters, spectrum analysers and tempo maps we have at our disposal are a red herring, an unnecessary distraction from what we should be doing? Sort of. That definitely can be and they absolutely shouldn’t be used as any kind of substitute for using one’s ears, though I don’t think anyone would suggest that they should be. What I’m saying is that the extraordinary resolution offered by the timeline’s grid and waveform displays, and spectrum analysers and advanced metering should be used to help diagnose and fix problems once we’ve noticed them. Not to find the, in the first place. It reminds me of a comment I read online where someone was suggesting that the vocal in Adele’s ‘Easy On Me’ was using microtonailty because it deviated from the pitch centres. I’m pretty sure that person only discovered this when they used pitch software. All I hear is a good vocal.

To find out more about the Advanced Solo Modes, below is the video referred to earlier.

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Photos by cottonbro studio, Quốc Bảo