Recording - September 2016 - 30

Before I go deep, I feel obligated to try to make it
clear that my process is my process. I've arrived at
my process after many years of plying my craft. I
have no doubt that a good deal of how I go about
mixing would resonate with many other mix engineers, but maybe some of how I do what I do, not so
much. Over the course of my career as a musician,
I've been fortunate to find myself in situations where I
was involved with productions on which some really
amazing engineers have mixed, including Bob
Clearmountain, Jack Joseph Puig, Mark Needham,
Jim Scott, and many others. Being a fly on the wall in
their sessions has been remarkably informative; I've
absorbed many techniques I learned from these masters, but they mix how they mix, and I mix how I mix.
And you'll mix how you mix...
One size does not fit all
There's one especially good reason why relatively
inexperienced engineers have a tough time wrapping their minds around mixing: it's really complicated! It's art meets science meets infinity. I'm guessing
that given the same set of tracks to mix, it's more
likely two engineers could enter the same lottery and
both win jackpots, than it would be to give them
identical tools and expect their mixes to be crafted
identically. I was 24 years old when I began my
professional engineering career. It wasn't until I was
in my late 30s that I finally felt confident in my ability, through mixing, to evolve a group of tracks into a
whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.

Part 1:

Prep your workspace, pan your tracks, deal with edits and noise
By Bruce Kaphan
My interest in audio engineering stemmed from my passion for making music. By the time I was in my teens I owned my first tape recorder,
a Revox A77, and I haven't looked back since. One thing led to another; I've been engineering professionally since well before the DAW era.
As recording technology has become more compact, affordable, and
accessible, I've increasingly found myself collaborating with musicians
who are becoming engineers just like I did when I first began engineering-by engineering their own projects. Often on such projects, my role
is as much to teach engineering as it is to actually engineer, and when I
do take the engineering helm, it's usually for specific tasks that either
require more gear and/or more expertise than my clients possess.
When it comes to demand for my expertise, mixing is the task I'm most
often asked to perform.
Recently I've been working on an album project with accomplished
guitarist/composer and relative newbie engineer Greg Lisher. Along the
way he's asked me to help with some relatively complex sync issues,
various types of editing, signal processing, some tracking that he doesn't have the gear to do the way he wants to, and various other tasks.
As we've whittled down the list of tasks necessary to finish production,
mixing has begun to loom on the horizon. The genesis of this article
came when Greg phoned one night, asking me what he could do on his
own to prepare his tracks (as much as possible) for mixing. Our phone
conversation ended with me telling Greg that I'd send him an email
summarizing our conversation.
As I began to write the email, as often happens when I try to focus
my thoughts on writing about production processes, I began to think
that Greg couldn't be alone-the type of information he wanted to
know might also be useful to others, especially Recording readers.
30

RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2016

You may be disappointed to know that I don't
have/can't pass along a routine approach to mixing, not even for myself. I haven't come up with a
concise start-to-finish routine that I follow mix after
mix; In fact, I think the idea of trying to follow one
would be counterproductive to inspired mixing. So
what good could this article be?
Especially since our Editor gave me the green
light to write this article, so as to vitally inform my
writing, while I've been mixing I've been very
deliberate about being conscious of my decisionmaking process, and I've taken notes. What I've
noticed, and what I think you might find valuable,
is that while I don't have a routine, linear systematic overall approach to mixing, I've come up with
many subroutines-ways of dealing with smaller,
more manageable tasks-such that by the time the
multitude of smaller tasks has been addressed, the
meta-task of finally addressing the picture from the
widest angle becomes manageable. And there's
an added benefit to focusing on detail before you
focus on the big picture. You will have heard every
inch of every track, close up-you'll know where
all the tastiest bits are hiding, and this is where
inspired mixing begins (at least for me).
An excellent metaphor for mixing can be found
in house painting. For a paint job to look good
and last a long time, it's likely that more time will
have to be spent in preparing to paint than it will

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2016