Mixing

The last 2 decades have seen the mixing process turn from the natural next step of the recording process to the savior of music production. And with good reason, the tools available to us now are all powerful, endless, and borderline scary. Though, with great power comes great responsibility in the words of Ben Parker, a piece of advice that we blatantly ignored to such a degree that since our tools are all powerful and we all have the same tools, everything sounds so homogenized that you can't really tell who is the artist behind the song that's playing. The music industry was always fascinated with the next big thing and tried to copy all the attributes that made something successful, but I got to say, this has become ridiculous. Add to this the myriad of online videos, blogs, and sites that offer the same tips and tricks to achieve your desired result, and you have the sound of today. An anemic, all-impressive soundscape, with just the right amount of treble, bass, distortion, reverb, saturation, and utterly lacking in soul and character. Gone are the days when you would hear just the intro of a song and could immediately tell the band behind it, the album, and perhaps even who produced it.

Where am I getting with all this you ask? Simple. STOP COPYING EACH OTHER. Your favorite producer is relying on his taste and skills, not trick no.358 to achieve what you so desire. And even if you succeed in copying him, so what? He still has the upper hand by starting before you. It's better to develop your own taste and techniques. Is it going to be slower? Sure. More tedious? You bet. But if you succeed, at least it was you and only you, and you won't have added one more shovelful of dirt on the grave of music. Yes, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but at one point you have to develop your own skills.

Well, this took a really weird turn, I was supposed to tell you about mixing music...

Do you know what helps immensely with not copying each other? ANALOG GEAR. Not cause of the sound, no. Cause of the mindset that gear forces upon its user. You listen instead of looking, each piece always sounds a bit different, you can create infinite unique chains, and mod the hell out of your gear to make it even more unique. Can you do the same with a carefully crafted daw template? Sure you can. In-the-box mixing is all-powerful. But it's much less fun and you can't shake the fact that you feel like a programmer, not a music balance engineer.  The journey is just as important for the professional as the result. And maybe, just maybe, if you don't enjoy the process, you end up not giving it your 100%, or worse yet, finding a template that works and sticking to it for years on end, ultimately shooting yourself in the foot by developing "your sound" which is bound to become boring and overused. Analog gear forces you to reset, to rethink, and sometimes to take pause and reflect, cause inevitably something is gonna break. We're talking not only about a small chain of analog gear but tape machines, consoles, and weird vintage effects that demand attention and love. I know I make it sound like the gear is the most important factor, but in reality, I advocate for the mindset that the gear forces upon you. If you can have that mindset without resorting to analog, more power to you. For us though, we have happily camped in the weird limbo of an analog-based studio amidst the digital age. We embrace the ongoing, relentless slew of faults that creep up during sessions. It's ok. It's why once, the term "audio engineer" was valid.