The Mixing Engineer's Handbook

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Part 3. Balance talks about the main mixing work. This section describes all about compression, EQ, and other audio processing tools. Elliot Scheiner (interview appears later in this book): With a shelf full of industry awards (seven Grammys, an Emmy, four Surround Music Awards, the Surround Pioneer and Tech Awards Hall of Fame, and too many total award nominations to count) from his work with The Eagles, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Sting, John Fogerty, Van Morrison, Toto, Queen, Faith Hill, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Cole, Beyonce, the Doobie Brothers, Aerosmith, Phil Collins, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, and many, many others, Elliot has long been widely recognized for his artful and pristine mixes. The secret to clean sibilance-free vocals that sit perfectly in the mix without sounding shrill or strident The London sound was a highly layered musical event that borrowed from the New York style in that it would be pretty compressed but had multiple effects layers that put each mix element into its own distinct sonic environment. Although the musical arrangement is important to any good mix, it’s even more of a distinctive characteristic of a London mix.

And then goes the chapters about compression, limiting, EQ, adding effects, and other audio mixing processing. These interviews are contained in Part II of the book. Many of the mixers interviewed in the previous four editions have been re-interviewed, since their mixing methods have changed along with the industry changes. Many started on a console but are now are totally in-the-box. The book might be a little hard to understand for a complete beginner in the music industry because of Alex Case’s deep dive into each topic and his in-depth technical knowledge. Some explanations are very scientific, so the book is not a light read.Scrutiny. On a live gig, your mix is gone as soon as the song is over. In the studio, what you do is under a microscope and will likely be analyzed, dissected, and reorganized, all in the name of making the mix stronger. The “Tall†dimension (which is called “Frequency Rangeâ€) is the result of knowing what sounds right as a result of having a reference point. This reference point can come from being an assistant engineer and listening to what other first engineers do, or simply by comparing your mix to some CD’s, records or files that you’re very familiar with and consider to be of high fidelity. For those of you who don’t have the time or desire to read each interview, I’ve summarized many of their working methods in Part I of the book. In truth, the major differences in mixing style came in around 2001 with the gradual acceptance of the DAW as the studio centerpiece. Thanks to the Internet and books like this, the styles are now more genre specific than regional. 12 Reasons Why Studio Mixing Is Different from Live Mixing

Learn the art of mixing from start to finish by using the tips and techniques from the pros, with The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, 5th Edition. accuracy of the content in this Guide, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Also, So you’ve seen what comprises a bad mix. What makes a good one? First of all, let’s look at the elements that a great mix must have. The 6 Elements Of A Mix For more than two decades, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook has been the best selling and most respected resource on the art of music mixing for seasoned professionals and enthusiastic beginners alike. I’ve developed an approach to making records today. I approach it like fashion. This week tweed might be in, so even if I’m giving you the best silk in the world, you’re not going to be interested. So the one thing that I do is something I call “tuning my ears”. I listen to a lot of stuff in that particular genre to get to know what the particular sound of the day is. You want to sound contemporary and current but you can’t know what that is unless you listen to the records that the audience is digging at the moment. I’m not saying to copy it, I just tune my ears to know what the parameters are. So I listen to the genre to go “Let’s see what’s considered cool today.”

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Increased globalization has had its effect on regional styles. Philadelphia, Memphis, Ohio, Miami, Atlanta and San Francisco all had sub-styles of the Big Four, the globetrotting lifestyle of most A-list engineers in the ’90s caused a homogenization of these regional styles. Etiquette. You might get away with being a jerk on a live gig since the band or others on the crew usually will put up with you (to a point) as long as you do your job well. Not so in the studio. If you make someone feel even slightly uncomfortable for any reason, chances are you probably won’t be asked to do another project, or even another day in the studio. Andrew Scheps: Kind of, although I don’t use a lot of effects. I use a lot of parallel compression so that’s more of what I have set up. In terms of what gets sent to those compressors, some of it is consistent and some of it changes with every mix, but they’re ready for me at the push of a button, which on an analog console is great because I just leave that part of the patchbay alone.

Elliot Scheiner: Not necessarily. In the days when I was working at A&R, we had no remotes on any of our plates there. Phil wanted to make changing them difficult because he tuned them himself and he really didn’t want anybody to screw with them. There would be at least 4 plates in every room. Some of them might be a little shorter than another but generally they were in the 2 to 2 1/2 second area. There was always an analog tape pre-delay, usually at 15 ips, going into the plates. The plates were tuned so brilliantly that it didn’t become a noticeable effect. It was just a part of the instrument or part of the music. You could actually have a fair amount on an instrument and you just wouldn’t notice it. Elliot Scheiner: Yeah, they would generally start you as an assistant and I was basically like an assistant to an assistant until I learned what was going on. Obviously the technology was minimal then so you really had to know what mikes to use on what occasions and where to place them and the rest would come at a later date. But the main thing was just how to set up the room for each engineer. As a matter of fact, here’s a list of the engineers who contributed to this book, along with some ofEnglish mixer Andy Johns, who apprenticed under Kramer and eventually went on to equally impressive credits with the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Traffic, Van Halen, and others, goes a step further. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is dedicated to the theory and all the tools a mixing engineer uses.

Welcome to the fifth edition of The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook. There are a lot of changes and updates in this edition as I’ve done my best to adapt it to the latest trends in the world of mixing. Today even free or low-cost DAW applications are far more powerful than what major acts were used to using from the ’50s through the ’80s. It’s an amazing time to be an engineer, if you have a handle on what the tools at your disposal are able to accomplish. not be exactly suited to the examples illustrated herein; in fact, it's likely that they won't be the

Sure, there are a lot more books that mix engineers can benefit from than we have named in this short article so far. What this means is that many mix elements appear at different times during a mix, some for effect and some to change the dynamics of the song. Each new element would be in its own environment and, as a result, would have a different ambient perspective. A perfect example of this would be Hugh Padgham’s work with the Police, or just about anything produced by Trevor Horn, such as Seal or Grace Jones or Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart. The Nashville Style In Mix Smart, he starts with audio staging and the overall coherence of a song. Then the author goes through each type of audio processing, explaining its parameters and settings. I don’t build mixes, I just go “Here it is” (laughs heartily). Actually, I start with everything. Most of the people that listen to and tweak one instrument at a time get crap. You’ve just got to through it with the whole thing up because every sound effects every other sound. Suppose you’re modifying a 12 string acoustic guitar that’s in the rhythm section. If you put it up by itself you might be tempted to put more bottom on it, but the more bottom you put on it, the more bottom it covers up on something else. The same with echo. If you have the drums playing by themselves, you’ll hear the echo on them. You put the other instruments in and the echo’s gone because the holes are covered up.