Main Photo: Beth Herzhaft

AS: It’s hard to even conceive of that being a problem today… was this rule based on an equipment maintenance issue or something?

GE: Absolutely. EMI was a big, big company that regularly used to sell 500,000 to a million copies of hit singles and they didn’t want anything about these cuts being technically ‘flawed’ or damaging to either their own, or listeners’ equipment. The cost of recalling that many discs would have been disasterous. Because we were cutting to vinyl we couldn’t have excessive sibilance or bass etc, but the problem was, there were rules and regulations for just about everything else as well, including strict rules about the clothes we wore. But because we’d been listening to American records that were louder and had more bass, we eventually started challenging these technical edicts right around the time The Beatles became hugely successful.

The Beatles were hearing these American records, as was I, and the differences were obvious, so we were determined to do something about it, even though the powers that be hated change. All we had to compete with though were the Fairchilds and a few Altec compressors – that was about it. Consequently, I would do anything to make something sound bigger. I mean, I’d put three Fairchilds in series sometimes, not knowing what was going to come out the other end but occasionally what came out was magic! The drums in particular used to sound enormous through them.

By the time we started recording Pepper our approach had become all about doing things better; every song an attempt to improve on the one before. Even if we got a great drum sound on a previous song, we wouldn’t use that same sound again. Every track was like a new challenge demanding a new approach.

AS: In essence, it was a pure pop mentality…

GE: You’re right. But back then we were limited in so many respects. For instance, the equalisation on the Red 51 console only had treble and bass controls on it. We did have an outboard equaliser as well, which had 2.7, 3.5 and 10kHz controls, but that was it. If you wanted different sonic textures on tracks you had to utilise different microphones, ones that were duller or brighter – a discipline that is rarely applied these days. It’s funny, because if you read some of the literature that’s out there about all this, you’d think we had equipment coming out our ears, but we didn’t. There’s one particular book that talks about all the gear we used, half of which I’ve never even seen before!

A REVOLUTION

AS: It amazes me how quickly you became good at creating new sounds, particularly when you’d grown up in such a conservative establishment as EMI. How did that come about? Were you secretly plotting to turn the world on its head while you were Norman Smith’s assistant or something [Geoff trained under Norman as an assistant during the early ’60s]?

GE: No, not at all, although I would often look at how Norman was going about it and think to myself, ‘I think I’d do that a little differently if I were in the big chair’. The thing is I would always just listen off the studio floor first to get a ‘trigger’ from the music, or from what the guys were saying to one another or to me. It might have been a harmonic off an instrument or a conversation between the band members – anything that might catch my ear. A good example of this was getting the sound for John’s vocal on that fateful day when we recorded Tomorrow Never Knows. John asked me to make him “sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountain top” so after a short panic attack and looking around the facility for something that might generate such a sound – there were no ‘Dalai Lama mountain top’ echo units handy you see, only a bunch of guitar amplifiers – I decided to try putting the vocal through the studio’s Leslie cabinet, which no-one had ever done before to my knowledge. As it turned out, it worked brilliantly, with ample portions of echo thrown in there too.

Recording with The Beatles was a collaborative artistic pursuit, which involved crafting sounds rather than just saying, ‘oh well we’ve got three guitars, drums and bass… that’s the sound’. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes if I’d had that mentality. Song production is about blending sounds and instruments and merging them together. It’s an art form. The point is, any engineer can paint by numbers, but if you want those magic brush strokes like the ones you see in famous paintings, you have to put them in, they don’t make themselves all that often.

AS: It sounds like you were pretty good at interpreting abstract requests…

GE: I was I guess.

ADDING SALT TO PEPPER

AS: Sgt. Pepper sounds like it was very eclectic in terms of the engineering approach in that, as you say, no two songs or recording techniques were ever repeated. What sparked this sudden explosion of sonic exploration in you and the band do you think?

GE: It was a lot of things really, but partly it was because The Beatles weren’t intending to tour again so they suddenly felt liberated to make their records more experimental. If they didn’t have to play the songs live they could essentially do anything. And that experimentation was reflected on the engineering side of things as well. And, of course, at the time – and I’m using Pepper here as the example because it was a huge album in terms of sonic advancement, as was Revolver to a lesser extent – it was an extremely exciting process to be part of. I remember after we’d recorded A Day in the Life on that magical night… we’d just done the monitor mix and Ron Richards – who recorded the Hollies – was sitting on the floor in the control room looking up at the ceiling saying: “I think I might have to give this game away now. How do you top that?!”.

Everyone was absolutely silent that night. Control room Number One wasn’t very big, so most people were sort of huddled by the door or outside it, listening to the rough mix and there were no words to describe it. It was so magical and wonderful. It was like going from a square black and white picture to a Technicolor Cinemascope picture for the very first time.

AS: And this monitor mix was mono I presume?

GE: Sure.

MONO–LITHIC

AS: Which brings me to the whole concept that seemed central to achieving the Sgt. Pepper sound – submixing. With mono in mind rather than stereo, how did you choose what got bounced together, or was a stereo mix still in the back of your mind somewhere?

GE: No, not at all. The stereo mixes, which were done by myself, Richard Lush and George Martin came out later. But a small point to make about those mixes – while we’re on the subject – is that even though they only took three days to complete, they weren’t ‘rushed’ as some people have inferred over the years. That’s just how long they took to complete. But certainly during the recording of Pepper stereo was hardly even considered because it was the preserve of classical recordings at that stage. Mono was the format to which all our work was referenced and the format that influenced the way things sounded. For instance, it was always very hard to get two electric guitars to be easily distinguished from one another in mono and that was a great motivator to make things sound distinctive. It took a long time to get them to work together sometimes, but thankfully we had the luxury of time to get things sounding right during Beatles sessions. It’s very easy to put one guitar left and one guitar right in stereo, but in mono, things were different.

If, for instance, I couldn’t achieve distinction between two guitars out of a single speaker, or if there was a keyboard in there that was getting lost, I would often speak to John or George and say, “The guitar sounds aren’t working with the keyboard, can we alter the EQ on the amps?” There was more control over the sounds from the studio floor back then than there was from the control room.

AS: Given that mono mixing made panning a non-issue then, how did you choose what went with what on a track of tape during a tracking session or submix pass?

GE: We always knew roughly that we were going to record drums, bass, a couple of guitars and whatever else, and generally we’d put the two guitars together on their own track, and bass and drums together as well. In the early days I put bass and drums on the one track for the simple reason that if I didn’t have enough bass or drums when it came to the four-track mix, I could always bring the drums out with some treble EQ and the bass out with more bass EQ. We did four-track to four-track one-inch transfers sometimes too to enable us to do a few more overdubs, and on some of these songs a lot of stuff would end up submixed onto one track. But four-track one-inch tape has very wide tracks, and that’s why the signal-to-noise ratio on that stuff was still pretty good.

We’d maybe bounce together a couple of guitars, a keyboard, whatever would fit… and on Pepper we always overdubbed Paul’s bass afterwards because he typically hadn’t worked it out until towards the end. This was really handy for us because it allowed us to overdub it separately and use the whole studio space to capture it. Richard Lush and I used to record the bass with Paul late into the night after everyone had gone home.

RECORDING THE BASS

AS: Can you elaborate a bit more on how you used the studio space to record the bass?

GE: I had this sound in my head for the bass that I couldn’t get with the band playing as an ensemble, but because Paul wanted to record it separately on Pepper it gave me a good opportunity to do it a bit differently. I was searching for roundness but also looking to put a sort of halo around the instrument. Up until Pepper the bass had always been close-miked (with an AKG D20), mainly to minimise spill, but once we started overdubbing it in isolation I switched to an AKG C12 set to figure-of-eight. We would record Paul’s bass in the middle of Studio Two on the hardwood floor, with the amp miked up from about four or five feet away, as I said, in figure-of-eight, and that added the halo effect by putting a little bit of room around it. You can’t really detect it but it’s there. I think the bass sounds great on Pepper. I’d been fighting to get a sound like that for ages and I finally got it!

GETTING BETTER

AS: What other memorable tricks did you perform on Pepper while you guys were turning rock ’n’ roll on its head?

GE: I remember once putting splicing tape all over one of the tape machine’s roller guides to create massive ‘wow’ – on the machine that was feeding the piano solo signal on Lovely Rita into the echo chamber. The splicing tape was designed to inhibit the machine from playing smoothly, and sure enough, it was wobbling all over the place! I hate to think what would have happened to me if the manager had walked in on us that night! That wobbly piano echo was never used again, interestingly enough, only on the Lovely Rita solo.

We also sync’ed up two tape machines for the overdubs on A Day In The Life; that was certainly ‘interesting’, shall we say.

AS: How did you sync’ them?

GE: I think, from memory, we had a 50-cycle pulse that went to the motors of both machines. We had a Chinagraph mark on both tapes that physically marked the beginning the song, and we simply cued them up and physically pressed the play buttons simultaneously – pretty sophisticated by today’s standards I know! If one machine got ahead of the other we’d simply restart them. It was really just trial and error. If you actually listen to the orchestral buildups on A Day In The Life you can actually hear that one of those tracks is out of time slightly. One orchestral track was on the four-track master and the other four tracks of orchestra came from the second machine, which wasn’t 100% in sync.

AS: So the 50Hz pulse gave the machines some kind of control, but nothing to write home about…

GE: It sort of worked, let’s put it that way. Funny thing was, you’d never be too sure if they were still in time until we got to the orchestral part of the song, simply because all the band stuff was on the first four-track.

On Pepper I used to change mic setups a lot too, all driven by the challenge of making the next track better than the last. But it wasn’t just a gratuitous exercise; there were always artistic reasons for these relentless change-ups based on the particular track we were doing… listening to it in the studio and saying, “It would be nice if the piano was less bright for this track – let’s try miking it from underneath with different mics, that might sound good.” That’s the way I always approached things.

AS: But it clearly wasn’t the way you were trained to approach things. Sgt. Pepper was obviously a watershed recording where a synergy between you and the band collectively ‘recalibrated’ the entire recording process. Is that a fair statement?

GE: It was for sure, but there was innovation before that as well. For instance, I remember Norman Smith subverting the EMI edict that all mixes had to go through the Altec compressor, again because with vinyl you didn’t want too many bass swings, and it made it easy to master the thing. I remember Norman saying to me, “I’m gonna put everything through the Altec except the bass, because some of the notes are getting lost.” The bass was immediately a lot clearer but he didn’t dare tell management what he was doing – there would have been an inquiry! That approach was a manifestly huge leap forward. He was also the one who taught me that when a band’s rehearsing down in the studio, you can normally open up just one mic and know whether you’ve got a hit on your hands.

YOU CAN’T DO THAT

AS: It seems ironic that The Beatles found themselves trying to be totally radical within the confines of what was seemingly the most old-fashioned studio in England.

GE: Right, exactly. And that was one of the other problems. They’d invariably meet other bands who would tell them that they’d worked at this or that studio, and that over there you could do X, Y and Z, no problem. So, of course, they’d come to us and say, “Oh, we’ve been talking to so and so and they do this and they do that, why can’t we do that as well?”

AS: It’s amazing in hindsight that they tolerated the place for so long!

GS: I’ll tell you why they did. Because whenever they went outside the EMI studio to record something, they could never get the same great drum sound or same great bass sound. They could never – especially some of the guitar sounds we were getting – match what we were capturing.

AS: Sounds to me like they kept coming back because of your engineering skills, not the studio. It wasn’t that EMI had superior equipment or better facilities – indeed, based on the conversations we’ve had, it seems like it was always the last place you’d find a new piece of cutting-edge equipment.

GE: Either way, they always came back, no matter how dire their issues with the place got.

AS: I can see you’re not going to take any direct credit for their apparent studio loyalty, so we’ll leave it at that!

GE: Except for when we get to The White Album of course! [Laughs]

THE RE-RELEASES

AS: What’s your feeling these days about the Beatles remasters being released without your involvement?

GE: Well, it’s absolutely stupid when you think about it. Incredibly, Abbey Road Studios constantly claims to have recorded The Beatles. Frankly, that’s insulting. Abbey Road didn’t record The Beatles, I recorded The Beatles, along with several other engineers including Norman Smith, Ken Scott, Richard Lush, George Martin and, of course, The Beatles themselves. Abbey Road didn’t record The Beatles, people recorded The Beatles!

At best I’d call these re-issues ‘generic’ since none of the original people were involved in the process. Frankly, I find it incredible that the original recording engineers are hardly even mentioned on these re-releases. It’s all the remastering engineers that get the credit. It’s quite bizarre.

When they first put out the publicity for these remastered Beatles albums, one of the press releases from Abbey Road went so far as to describe them as new recordings, which was absolutely ridiculous. I think after a while they withdrew that.

MIXING A WHOLE

AS: Changing the subject slightly again, can you give us your insight into the benefits of mixing songs as you track them, rather than after an album is recorded?

GE: To me, recording a track and mixing it in the one process is definitely the best approach. The recording engineer and the mix engineer were the same person once upon a time, of course – until some made a hit record by mixing someone else’s tape one day and the record company geniuses got the idea in their heads that this was the best way to do it. When the recording engineer is also the mix engineer you retain all the knowledge about the recordings that you need to take into account when you’re mixing it – the roles are locked together. When they’re separated there’s a tendency for the mix engineer to miss crucial cues and for the recording process to get out of hand, because the recording engineer doesn’t have to pull the work together, and in many cases doesn’t even know if it can be!

AS: So obviously you still advocate mixing a song immediately after you’ve tracked it, while all the memories are fresh in your mind?

GE: Yeah, for sure. Certainly working on The Beatles stuff, we’d mix a track immediately after we finished the last overdub. We couldn’t even wait ’til the next day to do it most of the time! You’d mix it that night. This approach definitely helps you feel fresh during long sessions too; helps you feel like you’re making good progress, rather than just building up a giant pile of work ahead of you to tackle further down the track when you’re already sick of it.

AS: How do you think the Beatles would have fared if they’d had the option of an endless track count and digital automation?

GE: I suspect it would have been a mess!

VOLUME & TONE ENTWINED

For as long as you mix audio, you’ll repeatedly find yourself in the situation where you or your colleagues perceive a sound to be in need of tonal adjustment. But out of 100 such instances probably 50 of them will require a simple volume adjustment rather than EQ.

The merry dance between volume and tone continues right throughout the course of a mix, from the moment you begin right up until it’s time to print. And why is that? Because boosting and cutting frequencies – changing the tone – is a volume adjustment, albeit one that’s frequency conscious. It’s never a static process. EQs are rarely if ever set and then forgotten, or established one channel at a time in isolation with a solo button. The interaction of volume and tone is subtle and complex but never separate. This is why, for instance, when a vocal is unwittingly placed too low in a mix, it also often winds up sounding too bright and sibilant: top-end is desperately added in an attempt to increase the clarity of the voice when all along the only adjustment it required was to be turned up, or more effectively compressed.

It’s not something that anyone should necessarily need to be reminded of, but I’ll state it anyway: boosting or cutting a signal with EQ is only another form of gain control. An EQ with three bands of boost and cut, for example, is effectively like having three little faders halfway up the console. Turn them all up and all you’ve really done is boost the overall level, albeit with some frequencies lagging behind and unwelcome phase anomalies introduced by the EQ circuit. So the next time you see all your EQ gain controls cutting (or boosting) a signal, it might be an indicator that your adjustment should have been made on the channel’s main fader instead.

The first lesson to learn before you start hacking into a sound with EQ – regardless of whether it’s to increase its visibility or lessen its impact in the mix – is to ask yourself the simple question: “Is the sound I’m focused on playing at the right volume?” If the answer is ‘no’, change it at the fader, not at the EQ. One other point to make about this: in my experience, it’s quite rare to turn a sound up or down in the mix more than a few decibels without then reconsidering its tone. This is not a mental process either, nor a decision based on a theory, I do it because it’s intuitively necessary.

LAYER CAKE TONE

Another similar aspect of EQ that’s particularly relevant to today’s mixing methods is the use of multi-miking or layering samples to create a sound. Again, in this situation, it’s not strictly the EQ that determines the tonality of the sound but rather the relative levels of the component parts. A simple example of this would be where an electric guitar is recorded with two mics: a tough midrange-focused SM57 (let’s say) and a full and juicy U67. In this arrangement – assuming the two mics are in phase – adding more bite to the sound might simply involve pushing more of the SM57 fader into the mix relative to the U67, rather than adding 3dB at 2kHz with an EQ. Conversely, a rounder, fuller guitar tone would be achieved by simply reversing these relative levels. Here again, the tone of the sound is dramatically altered without ever reaching for a bell, shelf, or filter. Of course, this isn’t meant to infer that EQ’ing the signal is an invalid approach at this juncture, by all means try it; just remember that using faders is often a simple and very effective alternative. And the next time your plug-in count maxes out right as you attempt to insert that final automated EQ across the hi-hat on your latest masterpiece, try simply turning it up or down instead.

Another example of where this layering technique is effective is in the mixing of a kick drum. It’s often the case with this particular instrument (as with so many elements) that adjustments are continually made throughout the course of a track. Sometimes this occurs so the drum appears to sound the same throughout the song (even though it’s often changing substantially within the context of the track to create this illusion). At other times you might want the drum to change radically. In either situation, adjusting the relative levels of typically two mics (or several sampled sounds) will substantially alter the tone and clarity of the instrument without ever having to reach for EQ.

FILTERING OUT THE DROSS

Once the decision is made to engage an EQ, the best place to start is probably with the filters. Filters on a console – commonly referred to as low- or high-pass filters – are one of the most powerful and underrated aspects of good EQ, and vital to a well-balanced mix. Because they’re seemingly uncomplicated – usually involving just one knob – many people overlook them, falsely regarding them as inconsequential to a mix and choosing instead to reach for full parametric band-pass EQ. But a good filter is a powerful tool indeed. A high-pass filter (HPF), for instance, is ideal for controlling unnecessary low frequency energy in instruments and voices that can soak up headroom and cloud a mix. Electric guitars and voices rarely require sub-harmonic content in order to sound full-bodied and rich, yet most of the time, recordings of these instruments are awash with it. Taking such frequencies out of these types of instruments makes room for the naturally bass-heavy sounds like kick drums and bass guitars to flourish in their own space. Similarly, a low-pass filter (LPF) can work wonders on shrill guitars, cymbals and hard percussive instruments that often don’t require the amount of top-end they’ve been blessed with during the recording phase. This allows the top end of your tone to be controlled and shared only amongst those ingredients that demand it.

When everything in a mix contains lots of high-end content, the whole thing can become horribly bright and indistinct, like an overexposed picture. Remember, a balanced mix is built with contrast, and contrast is a relative term: one element can only be perceived as bright relative to another that’s dull. So mix your sounds up with light and shade, otherwise the results will sound two-dimensional and small. It’s also important to understand that a top-end control on an equaliser is a seductive weapon that can work against you to cheapen your sounds rather than intensify them. Not everything needs high-frequency information to sound good; sometimes it’s better to take some out and let the listener’s imagination make up the difference.

TWO IS ENOUGH

The next time you have half an hour to kill in the studio (or even while you’re testing a PA with a pre-recorded soundcheck), try this simple task. See how far you can advance a mix using nothing more than volume and filters. You’ll be amazed how much top-end you can remove from some of those electric guitars, tambourines and close cymbal mics, and how much meaningless bottom end you can cut from vocals, acoustic and electric guitars. The definition of your mix will improve dramatically without any of the sounds appearing to change that much at all. But as with all EQ settings, filters can often be pushed a little too far, so it’s wise to constantly reassess how much they’ve encroached on your sounds. Sometimes they’re also forgotten during the course of a mix as things become more complicated and the focus moves elsewhere. So a word of warning about filters: they’re powerful, simple and subtle when used with a dispassionate ear, but they can wreak havoc if allowed to cut too deeply into your sounds.

EQ AS A FOCUS TOOL

One of the major ways to advance your skills with EQ is to think deeply and laterally about why you’re EQ’ing a sound in the first place. All too often people reach for EQs, compressors, reverbs and effects out of habit rather than necessity. The default setting: “I’m mixing therefore I must EQ every channel” is a mindless approach that will get you nowhere. So the next time you reach for an EQ, begin by asking yourself; ‘why, what has changed that demands this tonal shift?’ If it’s your imagination telling you: ‘I want it to sound distant and small’ then great, follow that thought. But if you’re doing it because someone who knows nothing about mixing is looking over your shoulder and you think twiddling knobs makes you look clever, don’t.

EQ is a powerful paintbrush for highlighting key elements in a mix. Unfortunately, people tend to confuse this concept with merely adding top end. The highlight brush is about focus not brightness. When a sound is vivid in a mix and attractive to your ear it’s not always because it’s the brightest sound or the loudest sound. There are many ways to pull focus, and while it may seem like the obvious thing to do, a top-end boost isn’t always the answer. Sometimes focus is best achieved with something counter intuitive, like removing all the tops and bottoms and hoisting the midrange.

‘But won’t my sound be ruined if I do that?’ you ask. Not at all. As long as your mix spreads itself wide across the frequency spectrum and offers the listener everything from sub-harmonics to super highs, the individual components within it are free to explore the space (no, not like that). Your mix is a self-supporting structure that only requires some of the sounds to act as foundations, not all of them. Chances are you recorded many of the instruments with full-bodied mics from several perspectives anyway, now it’s time to choose one.

Don’t fear removing extraneous tones from certain instruments, or your mixes will suffer from this indecision. Be confident and work with your instincts. By all means be wary of your actions, but whatever you do, don’t confuse caution with a fear of the unknown. Being paralysed by what lies on the other side of that radical tonal adjustment is no way to mix and often a sign of inexperience. Try it out. It might not work for the sound you’re focused on at the time, but there’s no shame in that. If your imagination and memory bank are open for business, the experience will serve you well down the track. Experiment with sonic alternatives and soak up the experience of hearing things from different perspectives. This will serve you well the next time you’re trying to resolve why an instrument is proving difficult to highlight. Which leads me to another issue…

SOLOING – THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Being able to isolate an individual signal (or group of signals) is an important function of any console, but using this feature habitually during a mix can distract you from the game, namely, putting all the sounds together. Every time you hit a solo button, you’re effectively doing the opposite. Establishing EQ settings by soloing each channel and constructing a tone in isolation is thus a potentially flawed enterprise. We’re not recording any more, let’s not forget, we’re mixing. It’s make or break time for all our sounds and the moment has arrived when we must discover how they all fit together. The recording process was an exploration into uncharted territory where great discoveries were made, but this is the journey home, and we’ve got to get back there in one piece.

Soloing is a powerful tool, don’t get me wrong, I use it all the time. But there are two things to remember about soloing an instrument for the express purpose of EQ’ing it. Firstly, by taking your sound out of its context, you’re generally going to act more conservatively, and potentially produce a sound that’s great in isolation but useless in context. Secondly, habitual soloing sets up an internal conflict that distracts you from the main aim. When an instrument sounds bad soloed but great in the mix you’ll invariably think to yourself; ‘Gee, that piano sounds pretty midrangey and hard on its own, I’d better back that off’. But if it’s perfect in context, why change it? During mixdown, it’s the context that matters, not the fidelity of every individual sound.

Where the technique of equalising sounds without the use of the solo function is perhaps best highlighted, is in the common circumstance where a sound refuses to ‘cut’ through a mix. Sometimes, no matter what you do you just can’t seem to get that sound to fight its way through the mayhem, right? I think it’s safe to say we’ve all been there. The next time this occurs, leave the sound in its context (don’t be tempted to solo it again – that trick has already failed you). Now shut your eyes. Manipulate the EQ blindly and listen for the point where your sound finds its own space. You’ll be surprised how many tonal vacancies there are in the mix you’ve already deemed impenetrable. Don’t be afraid of what the physical result might look like either. No one cares what you did with the controls. Ultimately, the EQ parameters mean nothing. Just make it sound good.

MIXER AS INTERPRETER

Describing how EQ works in a mixing environment is in many ways a bottomless pit. Unfortunately, there’s far more to this topic than space allows, so we’ll have to continue this discussion in a future issue. Just one last point before I sign off. As I said in my last article on mixing back in Issue 62, your brain is a past master at accommodating for shifts in tone. If you work for too long in one area your brain will recalibrate your perception and that initially bright, filtered tone you were startled by two minutes ago will quickly begin to sound ‘normal’ again. Switching back to the original tone will then sound dull and ‘heady’. Confused? If you find this happening, do yourself a favour and listen to something else for a change of scene, preferably something that your mix aspires to loosely emulate.

The other thing to listen out for is the opinion of those around you. A good mix engineer can absorb and interpret the conversations floating around the control room and evaluate the different points of view calmly and objectively. If you’re a mixer, you’re inevitably also an interpreter and even the most seemingly innocent comment from a passer by might afford you a fresh insight that will improve the mix further. As long as you’re open to suggestions and humble enough to absorb the information from anywhere – provided you know how to interpret it – you’ll be better at your job.

Till next time…

COMMUNICATION & SENSITIVITY

To illustrate this point, let’s say for instance, you’ve just walked into a studio to mix a solo artist and when you arrive they’re already sitting on the couch in anticipation of the day ahead. What do you do first, sit at the console, turn your back on them and start fiddling with channel one? Of course you don’t. What you should probably do in that circumstance is have a quick conversation about how you both anticipate the day unfolding. If that person is the singer, you might like to hear their thoughts on how they’d like their voice to sound: how loud they’d like to be in the mix, their overall tone and the sort of space they imagine their voice might inhabit. Not a bad start, provided you actually listen to what they have to say. It would be ironic to think that someone employed to listen all day and make informed judgements would fail to ‘hear’ what people want right from the get-go, wouldn’t it? Yet this is precisely the mistake many mix engineers make. They don’t listen.

Good mix engineers are no different to good co-workers, good parents or good governments; they listen to what others want with sensitivity, empathy and respect. I’d contend that good mixing is as much about communication as it is about compression. Many mix engineers walk into the studio with their heads so full of methodology that any external influences just bounce off them like Flubber.

So whether you already know the song you’re about to mix or you’ve never heard it before, your mind should be supple enough and your attitude sensitive enough for all these types of factors to have some affect over how you approach the starting line.

BANG, & THEY’RE OFF!

Now that we’ve established that there’s no right way – at least, none that’s universal – we must now dive into ironic territory and try and establish some concepts that do work for most people. Here again, it’s the way your mind approaches the task ahead that matters most, and a thinking mind is always what you need engaged in order to mix something well (as Stav always attests).

But let’s just get one thing straight here. A thinking mind is not an ‘all-knowing’ mind, nor is a thinker merely a scientist who lacks vision or flair. It’s naïve and stupid to imply that ‘to think’ is to always act from an analytical point of view. That’s an adolescent philosophy best left in the schoolyard. If you’re establishing an accurate delay time you need to use your brain to work it out. Alternatively, you might decide to just ‘feel the beat’ and use a tap delay. Either way, your mind makes the decision. So don’t be afraid to think, just remember that there are boundless ways of thinking – working with your mind and artistic endeavour are not opposites of one another.

PRACTISE MAKES PERFECT

Like good painters and good golfers, good mix engineers practise their art. Some mix so often that they never bother hitting the practise fairway at all, while others might spend half an hour practising one type of technique before every session. Either way, the one thing that’s crucially important is to know your tools, whether that be an analogue console and a pile of outboard gear or a particular computer program and plug-ins. Familiarity with your tools is key – knowing the strengths and weaknesses of how each individual device functions under different circumstances and with different impetus is vitally important. And the only way to develop this knowledge is to work, work and work some more. Building up a sonic memory of all these different experiences is what you then draw upon when a particular ‘problem’ needs ‘solving’.

Practise and experimentation are, needless to say, cornerstones of good mixing technique. Mixes don’t just come together by chance – although certain elements invariably do at one time or another, and there are occasional holes-in-one, but these are very rare. Learning how to create clean sounds, distorted sounds, wet sounds, distant ghosts and phantoms are all techniques there to be discovered, either by chance, by lateral thought, by necessity or desire. Applying these techniques appropriately to the ingredients of your mix is the next big step.

PULLING A GOOD MIX

I hate the term ‘pulling a mix’ but however you like to describe the process, a good mix is one that translates well across different systems, presents the music as the musicians originally intended it (in some form or other) and is finished within a certain time frame. Your mix might be very simple and devoid of complex method or full of hi-tech trickery and multi-layered sounds. Either way, some of the key components of a good mix are understanding its overall ‘tone’ early on in proceedings, confidence in your own abilities and a good grasp of what’s required by the song, where it’s intended to be played and what volume it’s most likely to be played at.

To me the most critical aspects of a good mix are probably knowing the tone of your workplace speakers (so you don’t make the mistake of tonally adjusting speaker X to sound like speaker Y), and making sure you listen to what everyone involved in the recording wants from the final mixdown. It’s easy to forget that the artist’s opinion is fundamental to a successful outcome – the worst mix engineers are those who don’t listen to what everyone wants, and later, when that’s not delivered to the client, they’re defensive and precious about the mix they’ve ‘pulled’.

SOME SIMPLE TECHNIQUES

Mixing techniques run as deep as Loch Ness. There is no possible way that a single article on the subject can hope to cover even one small facet of it. All this article intends to impart is the simple notion that thinking and acting for yourself is the best way forward. So let’s now look at a few basics of mixing, keeping this clearly in mind.

GOLDEN TONE

One of the most fundamental aspects of mixing sounds together is establishing a ‘tone’. Whether you’re mixing a song, an album, a film or an installation piece, the tone of the mix is a fundamental aspect of the outcome you’re driving towards, and the sooner you know where you’re heading in this regard the better. More mixes stall, disintegrate or go on ad infinitum over disagreements about tone than almost any other issue.

For those of you who don’t know what I mean by ‘tone’, it’s essentially the overall balance of frequencies the elements of a mix combine to create. A ‘big & round’ tone, for instance, might involve bass frequencies being shared among a wide variety of instruments and sounds – kicks, snares, guitars and voices – and might even include tracking or mixing to tape. A ‘clear & clinical’ tone, on the other hand, might emphasise midrange and hi-end frequencies that shine clear light on individual instruments. Suffice it to say, tone can vary greatly from record to record, and song to song. Choosing your tone early (and this decision should be made very carefully) will save you many long hours of searching and heartache.

Of course, let’s not forget that it’s also commonly the recording process that plays an enormous role in establishing the tone of a project. Provided the individuals involved in this stage of proceedings knew what they were doing, the tone should be pretty well established at the beginning of the mix. But this isn’t always the case. Simply put, whether you’re making minor adjustments to the source material or wholesale reparatory changes, knowing the tone you’re after is vital to your efficiency, time management and the final outcome.

One of the simplest ways I know to establish tone is to pick a song (or group of songs) from some of your favourite mixes (whether they’re yours or someone else’s) and have them constantly playing (all day if necessary) via a CD player or similar while you’re mixing, paying careful attention to the input path you’ve patched it through. (After all, there’s no point matching your tone to a song that’s accidentally passing through a radical EQ or heavy compression!) By switching between your own mix and that of your ‘benchmark mixes’ (with the levels matched) you’ll be able to tell where your tone is lacking or exaggerated. This will keep you on track, particularly if your surroundings are unfamiliar.

PHASE

Another fundamental aspect of any good mix is your management and perception of phase issues as and when they arise. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called into a session to listen to a mix, only to discover in the first 20 seconds that the whole stereo image is out of phase.

If you find phase hard to hear – and some people do – look for the telltale signs. When a whole mix is out of phase, strange things happen. Apart from there being no solid centre and typically a lack of bottom end, things tend to bunch up at the extremes of the stereo image, rushing to the left or right inexplicably. Pan pots seem not to direct the sound where they should; things supposedly in the centre of the image seem lopsided or indeterminate; instruments that should be only slightly tilted left or right seem inordinately wide, and so on.

If you have your suspicions about the stereo image’s phase integrity, hit the phase button on the stereo output – it might be on the console’s stereo bus, or if you’re mixing ‘in the box’, on a plug-in stereo output compressor or similar device. Wherever it is, get in the habit of toggling it whenever you’re suspicious about a sound’s inadequate performance. If a sound seems weak, hit the phase button, if it’s too wide, hit the phase button. If you’re scratching your head in wonder, hit the phase button. No harm will ever come of it, and you’ll save time, money and potentially a whole lot of embarrassment by making it your best friend. One thing’s for sure, mixing with two speakers that are out of phase with one another is a dead loss, guaranteed.

Phase is important wherever a single sound is shared by more than one microphone or speaker. So if your guitar sound is comprised of two mics in a mix, be acutely aware of the phase relationship between them. If your bass sound is made up of a D.I. and a cabinet mic, for instance, pay careful attention to the blend of the two signals. Sometimes the two sounds will combine to cannibalise one another’s tone, and this is usually (though not always) undesirable. The same applies to stereo overheads on drums, and anywhere else two or more mics make up a sound. It also manifests itself in reverbs and synth sounds, for instance. Many wide sounds like reverbs are contrived from out-of-phase information. When the phase on these sounds is flipped, or the mix is played back in mono – on TV or AM radio for instance – these sounds will all but disappear. So, again, be vigilant about phase at all times, in the same way a good driver regularly looks in his rear-vision mirror.

PANNING

Panning is another aspect of mixing that often leaves people floundering. I’ve seen mix engineers (myself included) sweep sounds back and forth like search lights with little understanding of what they’re hoping to discover. It’s not the easiest aspect of mixing that’s for sure, and from personal experience I’ve known countless mixes to change several times with regard to the stereo placement of instruments.

Panning is a very subjective realm. From a personal standpoint, I like to establish panning placements while listening in both headphones and speakers. As an aside, if the panning of instruments in a mix won’t settle down, I’ve often found that the solution is best discovered in the morning when you’re fresh.

Headphones are probably the most common form of playback on the planet nowadays and yet many mix engineers neglect to put them on during the course of a mix. I like to use them at various stages of mixdown to make sure the image of the music I’m presenting isn’t too wide, especially during things like guitar intros and so on. I’m not a fan of things placed hard left or right when they’re on their own, and this is something I’m particularly allergic to in headphones. In that situation I like to add a bit of reverb in the opposing speaker, or pan the instrument slightly back from hard left or right. Another thing to remember about panning is that, particularly in the digital domain – like everything else – it’s infinitely (and dynamically) adjustable – things don’t have to remain static.

LEFT/RIGHT BALANCE

Panning and left/right balance are, needless to say, inextricably linked. For many, one important aspect of a good mix is to achieve a balance of tone, volume and focus equally in both speakers. In the same way old-fashioned scales were balanced with small weights, the general vibe is to ensure that the stereo speakers remain ‘stable’ throughout the mix. Inevitably, instruments like lead guitars or toms, backing vocals or whips cracking might tilt a mix one way or another, but overall, the scales shouldn’t tip too far or for too long. That’s why main vocals, kick drums and bass guitars are regularly placed in the middle of a mix; they stabilise the image and provide a foundation for the inevitable left and right swings of other instruments and sounds. But like all of this philosophising about mixing, the convention here should be a guide only, and no one should feel obliged to follow it.

My own take on panning and balance is to share the focus around. So if a smooth guitar overdub drifts in from the left to draw your attention during a verse, the next main point of focus might come in from the right, followed up by something driving down the middle of the image. But that’s just me. If a mix is focused to one side for too long I start getting edgy, and this tension is only released by being offered something tasty from the other side of the image. Other people might feel differently.

VIVA LA DIFFERENCE

Mixing audio is an endless pursuit in many respects. Sure there are genres and styles, level issue and tonal constraints, but for many it’s the point of difference in a mix that makes… well, all the difference. Some mix engineers indeed pride themselves on creating ‘new’ sounds; any point of departure from the norm that the listener can connect with. For mix engineers like these, ‘convention’ and ‘style’ are terms to be avoided at all costs! Conversely, others prefer to mix with genre, clarity or longevity in mind, and find the endless pursuit of ‘new’ sounds gimmicky and pointless. In the end it’s all about what you do with the sounds in front of you, and how sensitive you are to your client’s wishes and the task at hand. If you’re mixing Brittany’s comeback single, something ‘new’ might be vital to its success, but Bob Dylan probably couldn’t care less… usually the way forward in this regard reveals itself pretty quickly.

FINAL HINTS & TIPS

When a mix is being finalised, whether at 2pm or 2am, remember to listen with renewed vigour to the final two-channel signal, preferably off the medium you’re printing to. One thing I like to do right at the end of a mix is mute the main vocal (or other main feature sound) and play the song without it, just to double check that nothing untoward is happening to some ‘lesser light’ in the mix. The main vocal tends to hide small failings towards the end of a mixdown, and by muting the vocal and revealing the sounds behind it, a few last tidy ups can be addressed that you might otherwise have missed.

If you’re mixing down to digital, don’t let things get too hot or too slammed, and if the signal is coming from the analogue domain, make doubly sure you’re not caning your analogue output to achieve the digital levels you aspire to. (If I’m mixing from A to D, I usually calibrate 0VU to –16dBFS). Calibration of the audio system, which should have been established at the beginning of the mx, is vital if you’re going to get the mix in the can as intended. There’s no point pushing the analogue domain into heavy distortion just to get enough level on your digital meters! If that’s happening, your calibration is out of whack and must be addressed before the mix is ‘printed’.

One last tip, if you’re mixing an album, try and refer to previous mixes as you progress through the songs, to keep you within a certain threshold of tone, and keep referring to your ‘benchmark’ mixes. You may not like uber consistency of tone, and indeed, the songs mightn’t warrant too much A/Bing. Nevertheless, considering the album as a whole is usually one of the ways a good mix engineer separates him or herself from the herd. When it comes to the mastering session, consistency of tone, volume and balance will be the general aim for the mastering engineer. Delivering wildly disparate tones and levels of compression to the mastering house will only make their job more difficult. And lastly, if you find yourself defending your turf during a mix session and revert to the old adage: ‘we’ll fix it in mastering,’ just make sure you’re right about it. There are very few situations where this hoary chestnut holds true. If the statement is only passing your lips to get you out of a sticky situation, walk outside, stick the kettle on, and while it’s boiling, make sure you’ve covered every possible solution in your mind. The remedies to mix ‘issues’ should nearly always be addressed during mixdown.

Whether you’re mixing part time, full-time, occasionally or for the first time ever, remember one thing: no one knows it all. If 100 people mixed the song you’re working on today, the result would be 100 different mixes. Making sure yours is one of the better ones is all about practise, confidence and listening.

So listen and learn, think about what you’re doing and make the phase button your best friend. A/B at regular intervals to keep your tone on the right track and above all else, back yourself. Keep your eye on the ball and swing with conviction. If the ball goes into the bushes or out of bounds, you can always tee up another!

Next issue we’ll look at some other facets of mixing like compression, reverb and EQ. Until then, enjoy.

ALTERNATE REALITY

Placing mics in positions that create different, uneven or unbalanced – call them what you will – perspectives is a powerful way to achieve wide yet beautifully realistic final mixes without the need, in many cases, for artificial reverb, EQ or delay. Unfortunately, most people can’t typically see far enough into the production of an audio project to predict where a sound might ultimately be placed in any final mix (unless they’re recording classical music). And it’s fair enough too. It’s sometimes virtually impossible to say from the outset in a long chain of anticipated overdubs where that second acoustic guitar or fifth backing vocal might ultimately be positioned between two speakers. But that’s not to say it’s always unpredictable. It’s often quite easy to anticipate where things will be placed in a final stereo mix given certain known expectations.

Take, for instance, the example of a song that only involves the recording of one vocal and two separate acoustic guitars. In that situation it’s highly likely that the two guitars will eventually wind up being panned away from one another to some extent, and yet more often than not, despite this expectation, 99 times out of 100 an engineer will insist on recording both acoustics via an X/Y mic configuration (or similar) with no regard for their final mix perspective.

Why not? This circumstance provides the perfect opportunity to record each acoustic guitar in such a way that when the two mics around each instrument are panned hard left and right, the first guitar will end up with a ‘nine o’clock’ (left-heavy) perspective, and the other a ‘three o’clock’ (right-heavy) perspective, with the more ambient mics dominating the middle-ground. This naturally leaves space for the vocal in the centre, and a sense of depth behind the voice that may even negate the need for artificial reverb altogether. Exploring the space during tracking sessions while maintaining a careful lookout for phase issues can produce recordings that are naturally bigger, wider and more spacious sounding. For acoustic-based music in particular, the outcome can be far superior to standard mic placements followed up with artificial reverbs.

This ‘asymmetrical’ mentality can be applied to all kinds of tracking sessions of course, and involve everything from subtle imbalances that create almost imperceptible depth perspectives through to radical changes involving one close mic and a second placed 20 yards down a tiled hallway. Pan this latter combination left and right for truly mind-blowing electric guitar echo.

FLY-BYS & AUTOMATION

These days, some of the more radical forms of panning used during mixing are concocted using digital automation. Needless to say without this advanced control many of the elaborate moves we make today would be impossible. The potential for weaving these automated panning scenarios into other simultaneous mix changes – whether they be arrangement- or mute-based changes, EQ mods or compression overhauls – is literally endless.

Compelling and/or complex mix changes very rarely require the adjustment of only one technical component. Take for instance the example of a relatively simple sound that’s designed to crescendo at the end of a song’s verse, adding impact to the first downbeat of a chorus. This sound might involve some sort of combination of backwards elements – say a detuned piano and a cymbal. The obvious thing to do with these sounds is simply start them off low and ramp them up as the chorus approaches.

But there’s another more convincing technique that consistently produces superior results (to quote a popular washing detergent commercial). Although it’s a more complicated operation involving a balance of automated moves all working together, once you get used to working this way it quickly becomes second nature. In combination with automated volume, EQ and reverb, panning changes can be used in this instance to create the illusion that our sounds are genuinely coming at us with 3D-like realism. You can’t achieve this by simply increasing their volume.

Let’s starts with our collection of backwards elements first appearing imperceptibly low in the mix. When they first kick-in, they’re mono – either placed in the dead centre of the stereo image or off-centre; it doesn’t matter, so long as they form a point source on the horizon, as almost any object would. The sound montage is also very wet initially (perhaps 80% or so, with no predelay) and EQ’d to possess less top and bottom end. As the sound races towards us for the dramatic arrival of our chorus, the sound changes in several ways all in the space of a few seconds: the source sounds get louder (via volume automation); the reverb dries up, and as it does, increasing the predelay helps isolate the sound from its reverberant surrounds (and the bigger the predelay, the larger the environment our sound appears to have raced towards us from); the fidelity of the source sounds improves by restoring top and bottom end (again via plug-in automation), and finally the panning spreads from mono to stereo as the sounds quickly take up our entire field of vision. In the case of this specific example – where the sound effect is made up of two distinct noises – it might be interesting to pan one sound to the left and the other right in the last half-second of the crescendo, to create the impression that the two sounds have raced towards us from afar and then flown past either side of our head at the last moment.

CONSCIOUS OR UNCONSCIOUS?

But not all panning is about sound effects is it. Unlike the example above, the bulk of panning that contributes to the creation of fantastic mixes doesn’t necessarily figure in the consciousness of the listener at all. Even panning that’s movement based can be divided into two basic categories: movement that can be tracked (ie. witnessed) by the listener – like our backwards crescendo example – or panning automation that’s crafted to function invisibly as part of a sound itself. Here are some other brief examples of both:

• A rapid-fire autopan setting that makes a sound shake or shimmer in the stereo image might go unnoticed by a listening audience but add greatly to the impact of song transitions. Typically derived from an outboard effect or plug-in, fast autopan on drum overheads at the transition points of a song can make the drum sound ‘shake’, adding impact where the performance might have understated the transition.

• Big effects on things like vocals etc – basically anything that plays a significant role in a mix – can sometimes benefit from their own movement, particularly at key points in a production. Sometimes a particularly long and vivid reverb tail can sound more 3D if it reduces from stereo to mono as it fades, inferring depth and horizon-bound movement. Whether this change goes unnoticed or conversely becomes a dead-set hook is hard to predict.

• Sounds can also appear to be moving without there being any panning automation at all. For example, recording two similar tremolo electric guitar performances with different speed and depth settings on the amp can generate some truly ‘wide and wobbly’ mix interest. Again, the recording process does all the work here; all the mix engineer has to do is pan the two recordings apart and leave the instruments to it. Panned in wide stereo, the two individual sounds appear to wobble as one in an unpredictable manner. Again, nothing is being pan-automated as such; the two individual (though similar) sounds are simply rising and falling in volume independently of one another – your brain does the rest.

• Non-core rhythm elements or melodic phrases can sometimes be shared between both speakers: one phrase voiced in the left, the next in the right, and so on back and forth. Panning instruments that are intentionally designed to be elusive in the mix in a constant, even unpredictable, manner is another good way to conceal them without turning them down.

‘TECHNICAL’ PANNING

Where panning goes almost undetected, yet has arguably the greatest impact on a mix is where it helps choreograph ‘focus’, and fundamentally, instruments panned dead-centre tend to command greater focus than things panned hard to one side (though not always).

All good mixes have an element of ‘focus’ control about them, whereby different instruments are brought to a listener’s attention at different points along a timeline. But regardless of whether this manipulation is done subtly or bluntly, panning often plays a significant role. Here are some other examples.

Pan automation is great at subtly ‘moving things aside’ as a new element steps into the limelight. Take a guitar lead break that plays through an instrumental chorus, across the transition and into the next verse before the finally trailing off. As the performance falls away, panning the guitar from dead-centre to the middle-left while simultaneously increasing the space around it (with reverb, delay or room mics etc) emphasises its retreat, and fluidly anticipates the approach of the next new focus element that’s swinging into view in from the middle-right and panning dead-centre as it reaches its maximum volume.

A song’s plainly-strummed intro acoustic guitar might start off mono but then spread slowly left and right in anticipation of the arrival of the main vocal, by panning the close guitar mic left and adding a second ambient mic to the equation on the right-hand side. This works well if you perform the shift just as the vocal kicks in. That way the change of spatial balance occurs as if by magic. If you perform the shift too early and the trick’s mechanics are revealed this manoeuvre can sometimes sound dodgy, although occasionally this exposure is a good thing, maybe even a hook – it’s impossible to say until you try it.

Backing vocals might sit well panned, say, 60% left/right around a main vocal but then open out to 85% when the chorus hits. Sounds that draw focus as they grow louder in the centre of a mix can sometimes feel as though they’re pushing other elements aside that were previously panned to the middle-left or right. If that seems to be the case, act on your instinct: as something grows louder in the centre, pan things slightly wider to accommodate it. Then, as the sound recedes, close ranks back in around it. Almost no-one will notice this happening, not even the artist half the time, but it keeps the mix sounding fluid in an unconscious way, and in some situations creates the illusion that the mix is alive without people really ever grasping how or why. This is a particularly important skill to hone when you’re working on material that superficially requires ‘no production’ or visible signs of mix tampering. Flexibility is one of the greatest gifts 21-century DAWs have provided us and automation is one of the most advanced tools in the shed.

A WORD ON MOVEMENT

Panning that’s fixed in position – ie. doesn’t move – during the course of a production is relatively simple to craft, and for these static audio elements, the overall balance that panning establishes between the left and right speakers is crucial to the final outcome. For ‘on the move’ sounds, however – moving either because the source was shifting its position during tracking (like a rallycar flying past a fixed mic position etc), the mics were spinning on a turntable while you were recording, or panning automation is being deployed – the mix balance becomes trickier. There are several reasons for this, all of them subjective and ultimately resolved only by your own intuition and taste.

The key to understanding which explicit panning movements best benefit your mix involves knowing what roles these instruments that you’re setting in motion are performing in the first place. Panning a main vocal all over the place, for example, would only likely prove annoying to most listeners. Judging whether or not movement of this type adds to, or detracts from, your final mix is a personal judgment call that only you and those around you can make. My two-bob’s worth on the subject would be that if an explicit panning shift seem gratuitous or silly within the context of the overall mix, ditch it.

Sometimes movement for the sake of it can feel tacky, and undermine the contribution that sound or instrument is making. At other times it’s ‘cool’ and has the capacity to hook the listener in. Judging the difference is a nebulous affair that takes practice and involves making a mistake or two along the way.

In the end, a mix usually comes across best when it features (or invisibly contains) a combination of static and automated panning setups. If it’s all static, the mix can tend to feel a little boring (but hey, maybe ‘boring’ suits the song!). Conversely, if everything is on the move, your mix may start feeling like a tank of tropical fish: every element too flashy, everything hard to focus on. Sturdy static elements help anchor a mix and allow movement-based components to create extra interest. Like all this stuff, in the end it tends to come down to the tasteful balance of ideas rather than an over concentration of one.

EXPLORING THE SPACE

Panning ultimately allows you to craft a stereo image to suit a collection of audio elements presented to you. Like all mixing, there is no ‘one way’, no ‘rule that always applies’. While panning can be one of the most elusive aspects of recording and mixing, it’s also one of the most powerful. Significant aspects of it relate to the ‘illusion of depth and width’, and like all good illusions, the trick only works if it’s performed in harmony with all the other elements. Once you start to discover its potential you’ll be opened up to more space than you ever thought was possible between two speakers.

BLUE MOUNTAINS BOUND

If mixing, for you, is fundamentally about creating a balanced three-dimensional world for your audio signals to inhabit, imagining that space from the outset is very important. Your early vision for it may evolve into something else later, of course, or be overrun by a stronger idea that occurs to you midstream, but imagining how the space you’ve chosen might behave if it were real is a good place to start.

Let’s say the task at hand is mixing a conventional rock song. A good thing to consider early on is how large the space will ultimately be that the overall mix is trying to occupy. Typically, the more sounds there are, the bigger that space will need to be – though not always. The way a song is recorded might also determine how you pan the signals, but whether it’s a tight, dry and airless room you’re looking to generate, or an epic Blue Mountains landscape, the sooner you decide this the better. Either way, choose your physical illusion wisely, in sympathy with the story the music is telling, but remember, if you have 100 people standing in front of you – and you want to see them all – your approach to panning is going to be quite different to if there had only been five or six (more on this shortly).

Okay, so let’s say we’re going for the ‘Blue Mountains’ option. I’ve heard the vocal, listened to the lead break and am inspired to go for broke! There aren’t 150 sounds that need accommodating between the speakers but nevertheless I want an epic soundscape. The decision is made, and it feels good…

CREATING A FOCUS

Time for some quick decisions… though these don’t necessarily need be set in stone quite yet. For the moment, the key is to remain open: to suggestion, to accidents, to ideas – any spark that will help trigger the illusion of space. First up, let’s decide on our fundamental focus. I’m going to say it’s the main vocal at this point (surprise, surprise) and pan this mono source dead centre right from the get-go, along with the bass guitar and kick drum, as per convention, and so that my bottom-end is being played by two speakers pushing and pulling in unison. Panning the focus elements dead centre also appeals to the listener on an unconscious level because almost anyone who focuses on a sound in the physical world will simultaneously turn (or attempt to turn) towards it, so the sound source is symmetrically positioned directly in front of them. (There’s no time to go into detail here about the physiology of this phenomenon, but simply stated, the desire of the brain to focus on a sound triggers the body to turn towards it – so that eyes and ears are front and centre.) Other instruments in my mix are two electric guitars and an acoustic, along with a tambourine, a keyboard drone, two BVs of the fairer sex, and several other incidental percussion and string-based instruments.

I’m not sure what to do with the guitars just yet but my early instinct is to pan the two electrics to about 8.30am and 3.30pm on the pan pots (about 87% on the DAW panners – more on why I’m not pushing them out to 100% in a moment). I’ll keep the acoustic guitar in the middle for now, it being the odd one out and one of three guitars. Incidentally, all these stringed instruments have been recorded with two mics, and they’ve not been submixed, which means I have the option of panning them in different ways, or not.

As things progress I settle on the panning of the electrics, and pan the stereo acoustic mics to about 10am and 2pm (about 40% on the DAW). One of these has slightly more bottom-end than the other, making the image seem slightly lopsided in favour of the brighter mic, and being obsessed with stereo balance – which we all should be – I endeavour to close the tonal gap between them a bit with EQ tweaks before finally deciding to pull the brighter mic in a tad.

Lots of other things are addressed during the course of the day, including the lead guitar break: the close-amp mic channel of which is panned centre with its room mics panned 60% left and right, and its level comparable to that of the vocal, befitting its focus – the other electrics are still playing during the solo.

STEREO ELECTRICS

As the mix evolves my mind is constantly addressing the picture in front of me, and the epic nature of the landscape I’m trying to portray. The guitars and vocal are key to this landscape making sense so I hone in further on the stereo electrics. These two instruments are interacting well and are naturally creating some nice movement across the stereo image, but the left one is my favourite; it’s big and beautifully played, and has epic qualities written all over it. The two mics on this instrument are an AEA R92 and a Shure SM57 (let’s say), and to create the illusion of scale, I change the position of the 57 to about 3pm on the pan pot and turn its level down a fair bit. I also add to this a delay of about 100ms (mixed 100% ‘wet’ with about 30% feedback) and immediately the scale starts changing. I exaggerate the 57’s tonal response, making it slightly boxier and harder, turn it down even further and immediately the guitar has started to sound ‘a bit epic’ – thanks to the panning, the altered tone (a sound at distance never has the same fidelity as when it’s up close) and the delay. But then it dawns on me: my big landscape guitar now sounds too much like it’s inside, not outside… the slap echo is too distinct and wall-like, even though it can certainly sound like that in the great outdoors sometimes. Hmmm.

I mumble something to myself like: ‘yeah, but who cares, stop being a super-realist you idiot’ but change tack anyway. I swap the mics around: the 57 is now 87% left and the R92 ribbon takes over the 57’s more distant, right-of-centre role, including taking on its delay settings, which are themselves now sounding duller and rounder. Suddenly my guitar is clearer and harder sounding; too hard in fact, so I ditch the 57’s initial EQ setting. I add a big 480L plate reverb, fed by the ribbon mic – panned hard left/right and featuring nothing much above 900Hz. The ribbon mic’s rounder tone accentuates the dull yet lengthy nature of the 480L space. To this I dial in a 180ms predelay. I eventually decide to duplicate the ribbon mic channel to help broaden and deepen the 57’s tone by tucking this duplicate back in behind the 57, separated in width by about 10%. Bingo, the guitar has become more vivid but also more epic sounding  – close yet enormous, thanks to the panning and predelays creating the illusion of something big and vaguely reflective in the middle distance on the right-hand side, and behind that a dull, wide and deep backdrop. There is no ‘zing’ coming back to the listener from this particular outdoor landscape.

The acoustic gets a smidge of the guitar’s 480L, but stays fairly tight in with the main vocal, which has a complex array of compressors, automated EQ and a vocal reverb. The vocal also has two delays on it that are panned 70% left/right – very dull – one of which is made to sound like it’s bouncing off the same hilltop as the guitar by also receiving a smidge of the 480L, and suddenly the song comes to life visually. I pan the drum kit but limit its width to a maximum of about 55% left/right on the overheads and toms. It sounds better from the kit’s individual perspective to go wider, but it makes no sense visually for it to be this wide in the physical landscape. When it’s made to sit back eight yards or so, thanks to a reverb, yet is panned hard left/right, it’s suddenly trying very hard to be 80 feet wide! I don’t want that. By placing the drums inside the guitars, their proportion remains realistic and the environment is made to sound even bigger, not smaller. Sorry drums.

USE YOUR ILLUSION

Finally (and briefly) to our other sounds: the female BVs are made brighter than the main vocal – yes brighter – but smaller, wetter and wider – panned to about 8am and 4pm, along with their reverb. I later just go ‘bugger it’ and pan their reverb fully left and right. The tambourine is back in the mix, panned centre, and its plug-in insert reverb is about 90% wet with no predelay and panned tight, about 35% left/right. This makes it seem like it’s far away. The key to this illusion is understanding that a big predelay would have inferred that the tambourine was closer to us than the mountains behind it – a predelay tends to separate a sound from the environment around it – but we don’t want that. We want it to come towards us from a great distance as if it’s out there in the landscape. No predelay helps convince us of this ‘natural phenomenon’ and contributes to the overall illusion of scale.

I won’t go into any more detail than that – hopefully you get the picture.

The key to this mix being both interesting and physically ‘outdoorsy’ sounding is by constantly asking yourself questions like: ‘How would the ‘Blue Mountains’ themselves have reacted to this combination of sounds, where is Signal X originating from, and how should that affect my panning, tone and reverb?’ and so on. I’m not suggesting you become a literalist about all this, nor am I inferring that this disciplined visual approach applies to every mix – not at all. I’m simply illustrating the point that understanding how an actual landscape might have responded to the band had they literally been there, helps to provide your mind’s eye with a framework in which to work.

MONO E MONO

Above all else, panning helps create space and balance. The real trick is determining how to pan all your different sounds and instruments in such a way that the overall outcome remains symmetrical. One way to do this relates directly to the concept of panning for scale.

Let’s say, for example, we’re mixing 250 channels of instruments, voices and sound effects – I know, I know, that’s a hell of a lot! At the beginning of such a daunting session, it might seem nigh on impossible to ascertain what goes where, particularly when the multitrack file is delivered to you like a ‘fur ball’, with most things bunched up in the middle (see The Mind’s Eye box item for more on this). Trying to find ‘like pairs’ and ‘opposites’ in this world of confusion is exceedingly difficult.

In this extreme case the most important first principle to grasp is that the mix is going to be big – and unless you cut 100 channels out, you’re in for a very long haul. Secondly, a mix involving this many ‘characters’ means that, in some form or other, most of them will need to be discrete – i.e. mono (or almost mono). Yes, I know there are precious, masterfully captured stereo recordings of pianos, synths, choirs, guitars, orchestras, and so on in amongst all this, but trust me, if you get hung up on each one’s exquisite individuality – as it was recorded – and try and find a big wide space for each of them to occupy, you’re going to get very frustrated very quickly… and nowhere fast. All you’ll end up with is a big fat mess right in the middle of the image. The main alternative to this is to edit 60 percent of the instruments out of the mix – a viable, and in some cases preferable, alternative. (If an artist insists on having 250 sounds in their mix, it’s vitally important to make them realise early on that each sound will compromise all the others, and when there are so many, the compromises will be significant.)

Generally stated, big mixes featuring very few instruments can be easily created using wide panning regimes and stereo placement of instruments, delays and reverberation. Big mixes featuring hundreds of instruments, meanwhile, mostly require pinpoint mono sources, as well as layers of depth, a fine grasp of width, and overall balance. Discrete sources create natural focus, a vital ingredient when so many sounds are vying for the crowded space. If you’re faced with this level of mix complexity, consider the ‘mono sources’ option. Somewhat counter-intuitively, 200-odd mono sources panned throughout a stereo image will typically sound truly enormous, provided they are also placed at various distances from the listener. Lots of stereo instruments panned left/right, on the other hand, will not.

BALANCE, BALANCE, BALANCE

Panning is also fundamentally about balance. Bright signals panned left require some sort of counterbalance in the right. Things soloing in the right speaker should be overtaken by another instrument soloing in the left, and so on. It’s bad panning practice to make a mix sound lopsided for extended periods of time, either by making the tonal balance seem skewed to the left or right – too bright on one side – or by making one side inadvertently louder or more dynamic than the other. Whatever your instruments, and regardless of how many there are, it’s vitally important to achieve balance with your panning. If the music draws you in one direction for some reason or another, the balance must naturally be rectified by the next musical movement that comes along. Sure there are exceptions to this dogma, but they are few and far between. A mix that makes someone feel like they have something wrong with one ear, or speaker, is a bad mix. It might seem ‘cool’ at first, but that impression won’t last.

YOU ARE THE PERSPECTIVE

I won’t delve into another example now – we’re out of room unfortunately. Instead, I want to leave you with one final notion that applies more to physical three-dimensional panning regimes than the more radical ones we’ll explore next issue.

When you’re creating visual, illusion-based mixes like the one touched on earlier, there’s one thing to keep in mind: you, the listener, are the perspective. If you’re creating a big mix – very three-dimensional, wide and deep sounding – don’t push instruments that you want close up, too wide. The reason for this is fairly straightforward yet subjective, but also dependent on how much you want to outright mimic principles that govern the physical world.

If a sound (in an otherwise big, three-dimensional mix) is dry, yet panned 100% left, it feels like it’s stepping outside the lines of the stereo image (see illustration). Without any signal coming from the right speaker, it no longer feels like it’s in the space, but rather separated from it. If that’s what you want to achieve with this particular sound, fine – just be aware of it. The drier the sound, the closer it theoretically seems to be. If it’s 100% left, not only will it tend to compromise the scale of our most distant objects, it will also start sounding like its coming from behind you, particularly in headphones (more on that next issue). Not all mix engineers would agree with this, but in general, a dry, full-fidelity sound panned hard will tend to fight against the illusion of our deep, three-dimensionality, since no reverb can exist outside it. It also makes a listener instinctively want to turn towards it, which is impossible, and in headphones, would set you spinning! Avoid going past about 90% if you insist on going ‘wide and dry’. Of course, if you simply want to confound the overall illusion, go right ahead. Only one rule applies in the end: do you like the sound of it?

Next issue we’ll get stuck into some of the ways panning can contribute to movement and depth, how an instrument’s pan position might be anticipated at the recording stage, and explore a few of the more ‘out there’ effects-based techniques. Until then, explore the space (particularly with a cowbell), and always remember, balance is king.