Mix Like a Wedding Photographer
I am on my last day of mixing a 10 song album for a Canadian folk-rock artist. Last night I was working on one of the tunes that is more natural and acoustic based. I had the vocal panned straight up the middle and the main acoustic guitar panned off to the right side. About 2/3 of the way through the song, there are 16 bars where the singer does not sing and the guitar plays a little busier and a little more melodic. The guitar seemed like a cool feature. So I created a new track in Pro Tools and moved that melodic guitar section to the new track. I panned that straight up the middle and compressed and EQed it so it would stand out as a feature. In a sense, it replaced the lead vocal in the section.
It dawned on me how unnatural it really was, that for 16 bars the guitar would be in a different place with a totally different sound, but then it struck me how little I cared about that.
If I am working on classical chamber music or audiophile jazz type recordings I will work to keep the image as natural as possible, but for almost any other kind of project, what I care about most is conveying the emotional experience of the song. It is kind of like photography work (FYI: one of my hobbies is photography which I do semi-professionally). Someone had asked me to shoot their wedding a while back. It was pretty easy, the setting was lovely and the bride looked beautiful, but after the big day I still spent a long time doing post-production on all the photos. The truth is that I did not really care about my photos being technically correct. I cared that the photos conveyed the emotion of the beautiful experience the couple and their guests had. I cared that the couple looked gorgeous in every shot. I cared that my framing and lighting brought the viewer’s attention to what I thought was the most important element of the photo. So I adjusted lighting, fixed blemishes, enhanced the richness of the color or the sky….
It is important to remember that, except for a few people in the world (generally audiophiles with $10,000 speaker cables!), most people are not listening to our work to hear something that is technically accurate, but to have an emotional experience. I feel that the best mixes are those that serve the latter.
By the way, I have two 6-day Recording Boot Camps coming up in Southern California and North Italy. Check out the latests schedule.