Mixing is a fascinating process. We're just one day away from the completion of mixing, and Angee and I have had invigorating discussions of the similarities and differences of manual and automated mixing. We remember in the "old days" of manual mixing how much we yearned for even limited automation. But now that we have it in spades, we can't help but reminisce how important the lessons we learned from manual mixing are.
I am partly mistaken in a previous essay, saying that mixing has "less to do with the human performances, and more to do with balance and sound processing". In a sense, mixing is a performance in its own right. In the old days pre-automation, large mixing boards could have more than a hundred faders, pots and switches. It would sometimes take many hands to do simultaneous fader and potentiometer movements, both on the mixing board and outboard processors, while the multi-track tape was running. It would take at least 2 passes to practice all these microscopic movements. Any small error (often in the order of less than a millimeter off the target position of a fader) would result in a bad mix, necessitating numerous passes until it was completed flawlessly. And this "performance" was on top of the two hours needed to bring up all the individual sounds, patch in all the outboard processors, and balance them to satisfactory levels. But automation has changed the nature of the work. A computer can not only memorize static setting, but can perform dynamic changes in almost every conceivable parameter over the course of the song. In one case, we wanted a track to start off with a warm reverb, then slowly but progressively brighten it until the end of the song. In the past we would have avoided this because it was not only hard to pull off with precision, but difficult to hear as the song was playing. But now it just takes a couple of minutes to program the reverb to follow our commands. To me, the big difference is that we can do the performance, then enjoy replaying it ad nauseum. But while this has enabled operations that were difficult in the past, a number of new issues have surfaced.
In the old days, the engineer and producer could take one look at the mixing board and see all the controls at once, much like an conductor looking over an orchestra or choir. One could not only "hear" a mix, but "see" it too. But nowadays, computer displays are limited by the size and resolution of the screen, making it difficult to see all the parameters of a computer-driven mix. Some studios have control surfaces to physically simulate on a board what is happening in the computer. But even large control surfaces I have seen contain "soft" knobs in which several paramters that can invoked one at a time. So the entire surface still can't show the complete picture. and we end up "looking" at the mix in a micro perspective, losing sight of the whole context that is the mix. In addition, some of the displays are so vibrant and attractive that we end up getting enamored, and not informed. The absence of an rational overall visual representation has put more importance on hearing in judging the status of a mix. More than ever, I often have to close my eyes and rely entirely on my hearing to decide if what we are doing is either correct, or what we want in the first place.
In spite of these and other problems, most of us "old school" types still manage to find a way of approaching mixing as a musical performance. This is because every movement has to be entered by humans, whether by numeric data entry, or by direct real-time mouse/controller gestures. Each manipulation must spring from both a technological and musical well. And this takes just as many passes before the computer is left to render the final mix. I feel that a whole generation of sound workers who were born and bred on computers never experienced mixing as we did in pre-automation days. Given some recent mixes I have heard, I sometimes get the sense that many producers/engineers have not yet found a way to articulate this aspect of performance in their approach to automated mixing, wherein the studio becomes a musical instrument, with the engineer and producer playing the role of conductor.
All the songs on the album are quite emotional, and Angee and I often found ourselves getting carried away with all the drama of the songs as we mixed. We felt like having actually played the music, leaving us physically and emotionally spent after each session. Such was the power of the performances, and the commitment that Angee and I made to bring all the wonderful sounds to life. I hope these rather abstract concepts rub off on the mixes on Tala-Arawan, and that the listeners can actually discern it.
