I’ve been watching a great youtube show called ‘Pensado’s Place’ which consists of Dave Pensado, a top mixing engineer based in Hollywood, California and his manager Herb talking mixing with in depth hands on demonstrations and incredible guests.
Check it out, it has a lot of brilliant insights and handy hints.
The thing I want to expand upon exactly is a metaphor Dave used to explain mixing.
“Mixing is very much cooking.”
Now, let’s deconstruct the metaphor. With cooking you have a meal you are aiming to make. To get that meal you follow or create a recipe using the ingredients you have at home and the ones you go and buy (or grow). Now you use kitchen techniques and implements to prepare the food, cook the food and serve the food. Now based on all these components each one will dictate if the meal is what you were aiming for in terms of taste, color, texture, presentation, balance, the amount of food and how good the food is overall.
Now, we can liken this process to mixing, pretty much substituting mixing components straight up. You have a song you want to create by mixing it, you have that picture where you want to end up, you know how you want it to sound. There’s your recipe. Now you have your sound sources. You might use stock content like samples and prerecorded material. Sometimes you’ll be starting from scratch so you’ll go and record the source material, one could say you go and buy the ingredients etc. Now that you have your tracks (ingredients) you now need to prepare them through the editing process (preparing). Once you have the tracks trimmed up with edits and fades and gain staging (cutting, chopping, peeling, defrosting etc) you will need to start to mix them together. You can start by sorting out basic levels through your main fader’s (deciding upon the amounts you need and where), then you can start panning (mixing ingredients together), then you can start EQ’ing, compressing, limiting, effecting and so on. (This part could be liken to actually cooking what you have prepared.) Then once you have finished the mix you need to do your minute touches to get a nice balance across speaker systems. (Adding seasoning) Once you have your mix down, you will bounce it down to two track and prepare it for mastering (serving up your meal in a dish) Then your mix goes off to mastering or you might do it yourself. (You might clean up the plate and have a final taste to make sure the meal is complete taste and presentation wise.) Now you have your final product, off to distribution and then consumption. Exactly the same as when a meal gets served and eaten.
Now it kind of simplifies the whole mixing process but I think it’s a very close comparison.
You can’t cook a high quality meal if you have poor ingredients. You can only make poor quality ingredients into a certain level of meal but you’ll have to prepare it a lot more and use different ways to cook it to get it there. Sometimes people make their own recipes and when they don’t have a vision or plan it out the results may not be what they expect. You can easily burn a very good cut of meat. Too much of one meal can get boring. You can have the most expensive kitchen ever but if the cook using it can’t use it the meals will still come out as good as the cook can make them. Some people just don’t like certain foods. Some people like particular types of cooking. And it goes on and on. I think it’s such a great metaphor as pretty every single statement I can make about cooking it also applies to music once you put it into context.
If you can’t find the problem with a mix, maybe go through the cooking process and eliminate each stage. Might it be the overall recipe? (Producer/song?), are some of the ingredients off? (Are some of the instruments out of tune?), Were the ingredients prepared correctly? (Were the tracks edited to eliminate errant noise and tracks comped for the best performances), do you have the proportions of the ingredients correct? (Is something mixed too loud or soft?), Is something over or under cooked? (Have your effect or under effected something in the mix?), Is the presentation messy? (Is the final mix translating?), Are you serving the meals on time, in the correct location and to the right people? (Mastering problems? Distribution problems?), Are the people eating the meal enjoying it and has it met or exceeded their expectations? (Was the overall song good or bad?).
The thing is you can go on and on with the metaphor and it holds up which is so great. To be able to liken the entire process so other people can maybe understand something better is a great thing.
Russel Murton