I’m of a certain age where, when on a visit to my doctor, he told me that if I got out of bed in the morning and didn’t feel some pain, then I wasn’t well, I was dead. Of course this is tongue is cheek, however, his point was that once you are north of fifty years old, then expect your health to go south.
This became acutely clear when I was living an unhealthy life. I was about six stones heavier than I should be, that’s 84lbs in old money. During this time I suffered from numerous health conditions. Indigestion, stomach problems, back ache, neck ache, snoring, poor sleep and copious sweating. It was all just part of my life, then I returned from a weekend away, having eaten some amazing food and drank a lot of red wine, to find a terrible pain in my foot. I thought I had broken my toe, it was bright red and felt like it was on fire. I booked an appointment with my GP who told me I had gout.
I asked her to repeat herself. Gout? Isn’t that the illness of Henry VIII, of fat men in Hogarth paintings and Port drinkers? Apparently not, suddenly an illness that I’d always thought was somewhat humorous was now meaning I couldn’t walk or sleep. The first attack took a week to subside. Knowing the extreme pain I had endured I decided to investigate what caused it and what I could do to prevent it. The answer was to do with diet and the effect of certain foods. I wanted to know how to prevent it, one part of the solution was to lose weight. In fact as I investigated the way to solve all of my conditions, there was a recurring theme. Lose weight. Some of you who read my articles regularly will know I did indeed lose a lot of weight and guess what? All the health problems I had ‘miraculously’ disappeared.
The Stupid Loop
One more story. One thing I find really intriguing when I visit the USA is the TV commercials. It’s not that they differ in terms of creative, it’s more to do with the juxtapostion between one ad and another. It became common to see an advert for a super burger, two huge beef patties, cheese, bacon, onions, hot cheese, chillis, relish, hash brown and other stuff piled on almost ad infinitum. The next advert is for indigestion medication or high blood pressure tablets. You see the problem?
Let’s Start At The Very Beginning
Still with me? What’s all this got to do with mixing?
A friend of mine working in location sound told me of the time he was given a gig to record sound for a costume drama, set in the 1800s. The only problem was that it was underneath the flight path for Heathrow airport. I was on a shoot where the sound recordist was trying to get time to record room tone, that was an almost impossible task.
In music, we’re always battling, especially in less than perfect rooms not designed for recording, to try and capture vocals and other instruments down the microphones. Or we rush to get a song down, with not enough rehearsal or a poor arrangement. The answer to all these audio problems? Fix it in post or fix it in the mix.
The problem is that if we are left to fix it in post or fix it in the mix then we are always only getting a compromise and a less than perfect version of how it could be. It seems like the loop of eating crap and taking meds to counter that, we’ve fallen into the same trap in audio production. Let’s find a plugin, trick, or god forbid, a hack, to make it right.
Push The Problem Down The Food Chain
I used to manage a post house in Soho, London. As DSLRs, low cost cameras like the RED, and low cost drives were coming into the equation, something else happened, and faster than we expected. Preproduction was largely dropped, as was shot logging for many projects. We’re not talking a family wedding video here, we are talking short form commercials costing tens of thousands of pounds, or indie film projects. Suddenly we were getting given drives full of content, often unlabelled and with the request to ‘edit that.’ Let’s throw the problem at post and cross our fingers was often the thinking.
Audio is much the same too. Many people think there’s a plugin that will make everything better, a pancea to all our audio woes. There isn’t. There’s not a single plugin on the market that can replace getting it right in the first place; be that tuning, noise removal or a host of other things we expect to wave a magic wand at. There’s no substite for getting it right at record, ever. It’s always a compromise.
It’s the same with timing too, quantize is clever, audio quantize cleverer still. However, quantize is not feel. Yes there are some smart algorithms that can replicate feel, but they can’t do what would have happened in the session. Check out just one of the hundreds of thousands of tracks I could use as an example where a drummer is in the pocket on a song. The drum part is locked in and working with all the other instruments to do more than just offer a beat that’s in time, it’s a work of art. It’s Stewart Copeland playing on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by The Police.
Prevention Is Better Than Cure
There’s some amazing technology on the market today, but they are meant to be a last resort, not our first. Speak to many top mixers and they will tell you the same thing; a well recorded song mixes itself.
It doesn’t matter if you have a million dollar studio or a laptop with a two channel interface and a microphone, the principle stands. Doing it right first time will always yield a better result than trying to fix it in the mix with a plugin.
Going full circle, I could have continued living an unhealthy lifestyle and popping pills and using other clever medical advances to mask the real issues, but that would have been unwise. Developers of modern audio technologies have given us incredible tools with which to work magic, but like those making medication, I don’t think their intention is to equip us with things to hide shoddy or careless work.
In the health care world, they say that prevention is better than cure. I happen to think that the same truth applies to recording audio too. In the words of that clever AEA marketing line, “fix it in the mics!”
Discuss