Mix Preparation 2

“When you understand arrangement, mixing is easy,” says Humberto Gatica. “You know what you’re looking for. Otherwise you’re fishing.”8 Andy Johns is one of the many other producers who share his opinion: “The way I really learned about music is through mixing, because if the bass part is wrong, how can you hold up the bottom end? So you learn how to make the bass player play the right part so you can actually mix.”

Clear out the clutter

The first common problem that I hear in small-studio productions is that there are simply too many parts going on all the time. Not only does such a situation make it difficult to make all the parts clearly audible in the mix, but it also presents a musical problem—although a full production may appear satisfying at the outset, a lack of light and shade in the arrangement will quickly make it seem bland, and the listener will stop paying attention.

The first thing that can help is to bear in mind this simple piece of advice from Jack Joseph Puig (echoing an almost identical comment
from Wyclef Jean): “You have to consider the fact
that the ear can process only three things at once. When you get to the fourth thing, the attention
drops away somewhere.” 

So listen to your
 track and try to isolate which three elements
should be the focus of attention at every point
in the music. Any part that isn’t one of those
main components is a candidate for pruning, so
see if you can chop out some sections of it. Let’s
say that there’s an acoustic guitar part strumming
away throughout your track; perhaps you should con-
sider taking it out of your verses so that more important drum,
piano, and vocal parts can come through more clearly. Save it for adding some extra textural interest during the choruses.

clASHIng tIMBreS

A common problem in less accomplished arrangements is when two sounds clash in some way, usually by operating in the same register. “The aim is to get all the sounds working together so you don’t get any nasty surprises at the mixing stage,” explains Steve Power, sharpening his scythe. “If two things sound crap together, you probably shouldn’t be trying to [ x that] at the mix. If they sound crap, just don’t put them together in the first place,

Most parts in musical arrangements are only playing something interesting some of the time, so if you try to cut out as much of the less interesting stuff as possible, then you will generate some gaps in the texture for other subordinate parts to have their place in the sun. Just this simple arrangement trick can completely transform the sound of a production, because it focuses the listener’s ear on what’s interesting in the music. There will of course be a limit to how ruthlessly you can perforate the arrangement before the musical flow begins to suffer, but most small-studio producers don’t get anywhere near this point before they throw in the towel.

As Hugh Padgham observes, “It often takes a lot of effort to have less rather than more. I actually spend more time pruning stuff down than adding things. Doing so can often require a musician to learn or evolve an altogether different part to be played, so what was two tracks is now one track. Every song is different, but I’m always looking for ways to simplify and reduce.”

To put all that in general terms, in a lot of cases in commercial music you want to have enough repetition in the arrangement that the music is easily comprehensible to the general public. But you also want to continually demand renewed attention by varying the arrangement slightly in each section, as well as giving some sense of an emotional buildup through the entire production. That may sound like a bit of a tall order, but it can often involve no more effort than poking the odd mute button.

Adding detail

The other main shortcoming of ineffective small-studio arrangements is that they don’t have enough useful detail in them to sustain interest. Again, there’s usually too much repetition occurring. A useful little rule of thumb that can help here is this: if you want something to retain the listener’s attention, then avoid playing the same thing more than three times in a row. By the time a given riff reaches its fourth iteration, the listener will start to drift, so if you want to keep people focused, then you need to introduce some variation, usually in the form of some kind of ll.

So if your drum part is a one-bar loop and your song works in eight-bar phrases, then it makes sense to perhaps edit the loop a bit during bars 4 and 8 to create fills, providing some variation to maintain awareness of the loop among your audience. How exactly you do the fill is up to you, but remember (as I’ve already mentioned) that the best location for a fill on any given part is usually where other parts are less interesting. If you feel you want to layer more than one fill simultaneously, then consider putting them in different pitch registers—so combine a bass fill with a snare fill, for example.

If you’re producing seriously chart-oriented music, then another useful guideline is to make sure that there’s some interesting little feature happening every three to five seconds— perhaps a particularly cool backing-vocal lick, a nifty drum fill, a synth hook, a little spot-effect on the lead vocal, some kind of wacky SFX sample—the possibilities are endless. Chart music needs to command attention continuously if it’s to cater for the attention span of young, media-bombarded music fans.

One other little tip is to consider the bass part of your track not just as a part of the harmony, but more as a second melody line. Brian Malouf says, “Generally, I try to have the bass and vocals be the counterpoint to each other. I look at those two elements as the central melodic components.” The more singable you make the bass, the more forward momentum it’ll tend to add to the production. The classic example I always think of here is Abba’s “Money Money Money,” but if you listen to a lot of good arrangements, you’ll frequently hear little melodic fragments cropping up all over their bass parts.