The Nightmare of Mixing Audio

In drummer Jacob Slichter’s excellent book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, he examines the music machinery behind the rise and fall of his 90s band Semisonic.  When discussing the release of their ubiquitous hit, “Closing Time,” Slichter reveals how the song went through several mixes and how each was devoted to a different audience:  Bob Clearmountain handled the initial mix, but Jack Puig remixed it to give the song a heavier edge for alternative radio, Don Gehman did a pop mix, and Puig returned for an acoustic mix.  Depending on what radio station you listened to, you might be getting an entirely different sound to your favorite song.

With the advent of streaming services, I have to believe that alternate mixes are employed less often today, but Slichter’s story illustrates just how important – how defining – mixing is to a song, no less than the musical performance.  In the hands of a gifted engineer, mixing can push a decent song into the stratosphere.  In the hands of an amateur, a really good song can end up sounding merely adequate.  I’m more the latter than the former, but I’m getting better.

I’ve sent mixes for my new album, The Human Form Divine (available on streaming services in a month or so) to a mastering engineer in Chicago, and I’m praying that I’m still happy with them when I get the tracks back.  We shall see.  I’m allowing myself a few weeks of distance from what was an arduous process filled with second-guessing, self-flagellation, irritation, bewilderment, resignation and – ultimately – some degree of satisfaction .  I am not a natural mixing engineer, and it shows; I started mixing my new album last October and finally finished in March!  It’s a good thing I don’t do this for a living.

Part of the problem is that I’m dealing with imperfect recordings.  For example, when we recorded drums and bass in the studio, we couldn’t get the snare to stop rattling whenever my son Sam hit his toms, so at home I had to go back and substitute every tom hit with a sample tom hit that we recorded in isolation (thank goodness we did this as a fail-safe tactic) and mute the snare accordingly.  I employed a similar technique on the snare when raising the volume wasn’t possible due to the accompanying hi-hat and cymbal interference. 

In the studio I also didn’t notice that the bass was drastically out of tune on two tracks, mostly because we were only recording drums and bass and there wasn’t a reference track that allowed us to easily recognize off-the-mark pitches.  Oops!  NOTE TO SELF: TUNE YOUR INSTRUMENTS BEFORE EVERY RECORDING! The bass performance on the title track of my new album was so good that I didn’t want to lose it because of tuning issues, so I ended up copying the bass tracks (one amp and one direct) six times, changing the tuning differently on each grouping to end up with one relatively in-tune performance.

But mostly the mixing process is challenging because my ears don’t pick up on subtle distinctions.  I’m good at broad brushstrokes – volume, panning, and basic compression, for example – but the nuances of slight variations of compression or EQ are largely lost on me.   Luckily, with a lot of trial and error, over time I used a few techniques that I was able to employ across the board.

Thanks to my bassist friend Johnny’s suggestion, for the first time I used saturation to help bring out a track rather than using a lot of compression.  This was a tricky balancing act, and one I’m not sure I mastered it, but I was able to get bass and snare to cut through mixes a touch better without having to squash the hell out of them. Even so, on some busses I used parallel compression a bit with good results.

I also utilized sidechaining extensively.  With the help of a couple of tutorials, I ended up doing the following:

1)      Ducking the bass slightly to make room for the kick.
2)      Ducking the overheads slightly to make room for snare and toms.
3)      Ducking guitars and/or synths to make room for vocals or solo instruments.
4)      Ducking a vocal delay bus with the original vocal track so that the delay can only be head at the end of a syllable.

The above helped enormously, as getting the vocal and snare tracks to sit in a mix has always been a challenge for me, as has the kick/bass relationship. 

Also helpful was being aware of accentuating frequencies in the 300 Hz range to allow bass guitar to be heard on smaller speakers.  I’m amazed at how the bass disappears on many professional recordings from long ago when played on tiny speakers such as those on a cellphone.  Today, mixing engineers are more cognizant of this inevitability.

I also used a high-pass filter on multiple tracks, boosted my vocal a touch at around 1800 Hz, and used a high shelf boost on overhead busses for a bit of sheen. Eventually, I created a kind of EQ blueprint that worked for these particular recordings.

Even with all the above and more, I had to go through mix after mix after mix of each song, listening on five different sets of speakers (studio monitors, stereo speakers, car speakers, a decent Bluetooth speaker and my phone) plus a pair of headphones to get a sense of what was and what wasn’t working.  And once mixes were complete, I got additional feedback from my son and two of my musician friends, Johnny and Anthony.  Luckily, by the time I sent them the final mixes, they agreed that the songs were in a good place, requiring just a few minor edits.

I have aspirations of one day hiring all of this out and getting someone who I trust to handle the entire mixing process so that I can free myself of this nightmare.  But then again, what fun would that be?  As much as I say I hate the process, I also love the challenge.

New album forthcoming!

Scoring the film "Preheated"

My daughter Sarah’s animated short “Preheated,” which she collaborated on with classmate Luke Snedecor, currently has over 1.7 million hits on YouTube, which means that my film score has now been heard over 1,699,000 times more frequently than all of my other original compositions combined.  That’s the power of getting behind the right project!

Composing my first score was a challenge, and it’s the existence of digital recording that made it even remotely possible.  How the old-timers Franz Waxman, Bernard Hermann and the like were able to compose and record amazing scores for live orchestras, all within tight budgets and timelines, is mind-boggling.  I simply don’t understand how they did it.  The advent of soft synths and sequencers has opened up the world of scoring to countless composers who may not even know how to play an instrument, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy process, at least not for a newbie; the six minutes of music for “Preheated” took me about three months to compose and record.

Part of the challenge was getting up to speed on four new pieces of software: the new version of Cakewalk (now free!) by BandLab, Native Instrument’s Komplete 11, Passion Flute by Orange Tree Samples, and ProjectSam’s Swing More.  Sarah, Luke and I had all agreed that the score should incorporate jazzy and big-band elements, so the latter two pieces of software really came in handy, though I learned quickly that even really good software has its limitations.  I sometimes wanted more punch from the trumpets and I had to find workarounds to get the sounds I wanted, but Swing More provided me with a great pallet to choose from, and I was particularly happy with the Dixieland music for the film’s end credits.  Passion Flute was perfect for this project – very easy to use and it responded just the way I needed.

Another challenge was timing.  Sarah and Luke needed every minute of available time to complete the movie, so the final rendering of the film wouldn’t be available until just a few days prior to its debut on May 9th.  I clearly needed to start composing well in advance of this deadline, and this fact led to a lot of editing, as I’d complete a section of music only to find that timing had shifted or had been extended or condensed.  New music had to be created or deleted quickly when three or four seconds were added to or subtracted from the film late in the game. 

The one bit of software that didn’t cut it were the lead string instruments.  Soft synths manage to provide fairly realistic wind instruments sounds, but the expressiveness of viola and violin are really difficult to emulate on a computer, so my friend Uli Widmaier brought over his instruments, spent an hour recording his parts, and we inserted the real thing for a much better product.

Overall, scoring for film was a hell of a lot of fun, and I’m generally pleased with the final result.  I’m even more pleased with the way the film turned out and the wonderful response its garnered.  It’ll be neat to see where the careers of Luke and Sarah lead and whether this short film will one day be looked back on as the beginning of something special.

 Shortly after “Preheated” was made available online, I received an email from a high school music student asking me to describe the process of scoring “Preheated” for her class project.  In case you’re interested, some of my response follows:

I saw the original storyboards for “Preheated” as far back as last fall, and this led me to first compose the film’s climax, the moving theme in 3/4 when the father and boy work together to light the candle.  I incorporated the same theme for the end credits, but switched to a Dixieland band and changed the timing to 4/4 and modulated the key to give it a fun, bouncy lift.

From there I tackled the beginning motif, which then helped guide the rest of the score.  Luke and Sarah decided that the clarinet should more or less represent the boy, and the violin and viola more or less represent the father.  For the first 30 seconds or so, I established an easy-going introductory tune that includes a 7-note motif that’s used throughout the score:  G G# E D E D C#, first with violin in the opening segment, and then with clarinet as the boy comes into full view.

When the downtrodden father enters the frame, the viola begins with an entirely different theme: a weepy, melodramatic tune to represent melancholy, but the 7-note clarinet motif comes into play when the boy tries to get his father's attention, and once again at the end of the section, this time with piano.  None of the other melodies in the section appear again because this is the only section of the film that has a melancholy feel.

When the boy has an idea to make a big birthday celebration, the music picks up into a sort of flute/big-band Latin piece, but because the boy is constantly met with obstacles, the music has to break rhythm regularly.  These were the most difficult sections for me.  For instance, the curiosity at 0:32 conveyed with pizzicato strings, the curiosity at 1:35 expressed with bass and flute primarily, or the confusion conveyed at 2:30 with piano and bass.  These little transitional pieces of music were challenging.  The main sections were much easier.

The "spooky music" section at 1:57 was originally overdone, and I threw in the 7-note theme again – this time with flute – just to keep the audience grounded.  This isn't a horror film after all, and we wanted to keep things anchored in playfulness.

As the boy realizes his predicament, the tempo increases and the instrumentation gets slightly more complicated to increase the tension as he opens the refrigerator and scrounges for something to cool off his hands, once again using a variation of the 7-note them from before, and culminating in a diminished 7th chord run as he struggles to figure out where to put the melted butter.  The piano does a sort of "ah ha!" moment as he discovers that the recipe calls for melted butter, and then again as he sees the melted butter in the bowl.

The boy seems back on track!  I returned to the fun Latin big-band motif, but the boy immediately hits another barrier, ending the music abruptly, and I used an aggressive flute sound to depict frustration (and to add a dose of comedy).  Once again the boy needs to think for a moment, so I composed a quick flute and piano section, playing a sort of flat 2 diminished 7 interval that resolves to the one chord, a phrase that will be used again when the father walks in to see the mess.

Instead of going back to the same Latin big-band theme, I kept the same feel but changed the melody, altered the time signature to 6/4 and made the acoustic guitar the lead instrument.  I can't say why I decided on this except it kept things from getting too repetitive, and the 6/4 rhythm gave it a sort of unsettled feel, like the boy was going to really have to focus to overcome his obstacles.  Even when he hits barriers within this section, I kept the rhythm going to keep the music from having too much of a start/stop start/stop pattern.

As the boy proceeds, things become more hectic and loud, with a few modulations until the boy achieves his goal of making the cake, and then halts abruptly as the father comes back in the room.  The sheepish looking boy is supported by the same 7-note motif with clarinet.  The father's anger is conveyed with the same flat 2 diminished 7 motif discussed a few paragraphs ago.

So there you are!I hope I get another change to score for film one day, and with any luck, it will once again be for my daughter’s creation.Thanks Sarah and Luke for the opportunity