A Week at the Mixing Desk, or Rather my Laptop…

Another busy week of both recording and mixing, as all the recordings for my new piece are finished! Hence the mixing is that is all that remains before I will be releasing my new piece. Which Still unfortunately doesn’t have a name, however it personally evokes a sense of journey through vast lands. Something I will try to encapsulate in a catchy name, because why wouldn’t you. This is also the piece which I am submitting for a module on my university course which aims to look at timbre as a more important musical variable, something I may discuss at a later date here on the blog given how interesting it is.

Two weeks ago I talked a little about recording, now feels like an appropriate time to continue this and talk about mixing and producing.

Ok, So... producing 101:

First off, I am not actually a professional producer, but an artist who gets by fairly well in the practice, but I can certainly give an insight into what is like.

Assuming that the recording went smoothly and you have good material to work with, you still have several important things to concern yourself with.

First and foremost, balancing the levels in the mix in one of the most important parts of creating a good mix, you need to be able to hear all parts. This is not as simple as just turning the volume up on each track until you like the way it sounds, because if you do this, you will almost certainly encounter clipping. What I like to do is start with what will be the loudest part of the piece, and get the levels just below where they cause this dreadful clipping, then adjust the rest of the track to fit around this.

Now that you can hear all of the tracks well enough comes what I find to be the most enjoyable part: Effects!

I personally always record the driest signal I can so I have complete and utter control of the sound from my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). With dry recordings, you may find that before you do anything with the sound, i can sound bare, and this would make sense since when you play your instrument in a room with reflective walls and surfaces, there is a lot of reverb, you also hear a certain portion of the sound through your skeleton just because you are holding an instrument, especially on violin when it is against your face!. This is also why your voice sounds different when you hear it recorded.

First of all adding a small amount of reverb will give a breath of life to a dull sounding track. I would even add a small amount to track that I don't envision actually having reverb, as in the final mix it will be barely noticeable if you make sure it has a quick decay time (i.e. fades quickly), but doing so will just brighten it up a little and also mask any chops in the audio that you will likely need to make to fix minor timing issues.

After this you can get really creative, as many DAWs offer a huge selection of creative tools and effects to enhance your work. I use Studio One as I like the workflow mechanics of using it and many of the features it offers, but all DAWs will have their own versions of standard tools ans some special ones.

Whilst such tools can greatly enhance a piece of work, they will not fix shabby composition or recording. If you are interested in recording and have not read by blog from two weeks ago, you may find it interesting. If you are interested in composition then you will like this week's theory analysis and those from other weeks. I post these every week for people who are interested in music theory and composition. right here on my blog.

With regards to life as a music student, well… there has never been so much as a dull moment as even though the majority of the taught content is wrapped up, myself and my colleagues are franticly finishing work for deadlines, and I can assure anyone reading that there is some amazing musicians amongst the people who I work with that are also producing fantastic work, who I may interview or feature here on the blog in the future.

My Co-write project should begin recording either later this week or early next week, which means I unfortunately have nothing from that to share this week.

I do however have another interesting piece of music for this weeks analysis:

The key feature of this piece is less complex than what I discussed last week but is equally as impactful on music, and that is the use of a pedal note. However what makes this somewhat different is that it is an imbedded pedal note. Often when people think of the term in terms of music theory, it is imagined as something that sits in the bass part to ground the piece, however that is not always the case, it is still a pedal note if you have a repeated note in either the middle or top register, however it is called is called an inverted or imbedded pedal note depending on if it is in the top or middle of the tessitura respectively. And such notes can have a very different effect to being in the bass. Here we have a D repeated in the violin across 3 chords; Bb C9 and Dm, and the pedal D emphasises a different note in each of these chords, and in doing so prepares and resolves the dissonant 9th note in the C chord and anticipates the resolution to the Dm chord. Prepared dissonance is another musical feature which I will talk in depth more about in another analysis post along with unprepared dissonance, but for now we are looking at inverted and imbedded pedals. Another feature of this technique is it allows for greater harmonic control/ clarity than bass pedal notes. This is because of the way in which more overtones in a sound a audible within low notes, thus meaning that low notes close together sound muddy, as would this example it that D was in the bass.