At some point in my journey in audio, probably later than I really should have realized, I had the veil lifted from my vision. While working with some of the greatest music and television production mixers on the planet, I realized something. They weren’t doing much as far as processing is concerned. All the eq curves were slight cuts and gentle boosts, their compression was never slamming (unless that was the sound they were after) and they didn’t have to stack plugins or analog gear up to get it to sit nicely and sound fantastic. For them, it all came down to microphone choice, placement and capturing the most accurate representation of what the artist was creating directly at the source.
I took these observations and then took a look at what I was doing and realized slower than I should have, that what I was doing was just too much. I was making my job harder, not easier, making it sound messier, not cleaner. I used to stack tons of plugins on all the channels, I’d have a tape saturation, EQ for tonality, compressor, followed by another EQ for surgical needs, followed by a De-esser or maybe some saturation to add in the harmonics depending on the source. It was always a huge balancing act working very hard to get the gain staging proper so it didn’t fall apart on me and constantly going back and forth to get it all to sit properly. Yes I could get it to sound good in the end but was it the best it could be? No. Was it easy to get there? Hell no! So I started to work on my chains, slowly peeling things away and I started to find that things just fell into place quicker the more I took off. Things started to sound more 3D and open. I could hear the separation better as well as the changes I was making to the tone. Speaking of tone, I also started to find that I wasn’t needing to push things nearly as far as before. A 1-2 db change in an EQ was really all I needed most of the time. My EQ curves started to become wider, I didn’t need those sharp cuts or boosts, a broader small boost or cut across a larger frequency spectrum produced a much better and more musical end result that sat in the mix nicer and cleaner.
I remember around the time I was just realizing all of this for myself a mix I had done was played for an engineer friend of mine who has some incredible ears and knowledge of the way things should sound. He is known in the industry and someone I very much look up to and wanted to learn from. He didn’t realize I had done the mix and was commenting to another person in the room that yeah it sounded good but it was “cut up a bit too much for my taste”. He was hearing the sharp cuts and boosts that I was doing to get everything to sit nicely with all the processing going on in the mix. I took that mix the very next day and stripped it all back and took this new approach from top to bottom. When I finished up, I A/B’d the mix with the one I had done previously. It was night and day, the new one just sounded great, everything had its place, nothing stood out as out of whack and it sounded full, clean, wide and to my ears polished. It was the best mix I had done up to that point in time and a truly eye opening experience.
In the end I learned one of the most valuable lessons I’ve been taught in this business, you can just do so much more with so much less.