u/yalllldabaoth

Music with distorted guitars and live drums seems to have a pretty different overall frequency distribution than most other popular genres of music. The amount of upper mids and top end I hear in loud rock/metal/shoegaze productions would definitely be considered harsh in any other genre.

For music that’s supposed to be aggressive like this, it seems like you almost need a certain degree of harshness to make sure the song doesn’t sound lifeless, but it’s a fine line. The rock mixes I consider the best always have some harsh cymbals/guitar, but they fit well into the song and don’t catch my ear enough to be fatiguing.

What strategies do you guys use to achieve this? How do you know when your upper mids/top end are right? No wrong answers, except for telling me to use soothe. That plugin is good but can kill a rock mix very quickly.

“You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake” is true only in the sense that you can tell how much he needs your approval. Because everyone is told stuff like this from a young age, most people (mainly guys) feel like they have to greet every person with a handshake that conveys a similar level of enthusiasm as a golden retriever when its owner gets home from work.

If you ask me, a handshake is really no big deal. Some days I might feel a little lazy and not want to grip your hand that intensely. Other days I might have a little more caffeine and pep in my step and give you a nice firm one. Doesn’t need to be a big deal.

I’ve noticed more people online and in my studio spending lots of mental energy worrying about what a mix sounds like on a phone speaker. I get it, that is a lot of people’s first impression of a song. You don’t want it to suck. But here are the problems I see with this:

1. Phone speakers emphasize high mids/highs and lack bass response. A lot of other playback systems that people use every day do the opposite. Modern cars for example. So many of them heavily boost subs/low mids and it’s very easy for things to sound awful down there in a car. Mixing for an iPhone speaker will often cause you to make your song unlistenable in any environment with loud low end.

2. Genre. Most genres have different frequency pockets that contribute more or less to their sound. For example, midrange plays a very different role in hip hop than it does in loud rock music. Distorted electric guitars live in that zone, therefore rock music is a much more mid-forward genre than others. The frequency area they occupy happens to be the one that sounds the worst and distorts first on a phone. Don’t even get me started on what phone speakers do to acoustic piano.

3. No reasonable person should be intently listening to a “mix” on their phone speaker, they should just be briefly checking something out to see if they’ll listen more. Wired Apple earbuds are $20 bucks and are way more fun to listen to than a crackly speaker that is covered with dust and dead skin. It’s not my problem if someone out there isn’t willing to love themselves enough to listen to music properly.

People-pleasing is seen as a negative thing, and it can be if you allow people to walk all over you all the time. But it makes total sense to care about the thoughts and feelings of others around you, and it’s better to do that to a fault than to not do it at all.

If you had to do a group project with 5 “big personalities” or 5 people-pleasers, it’s pretty obvious which group would make more progress. Sure, the people-pleaser group might have some problems with indecisiveness or indirectness, but that would be pretty easy to overcome because no one would be at each other’s throats over disagreements. The group of more dominant people who insist on their way would never come to an agreement on anything.

The only reason kindness and empathy are seen as weaknesses is because of unkind, un-empathetic people who take advantage of that. We could probably get rid of half the laws on the books in any country too if the ratio was titled more towards people-pleasers.

I find when I have a client (or clients) in the room with me while I mix, I tend to lose my ability to work from my gut or hone in on technical aspects of the song that they aren’t as focused on. My least favorite mixes that have been released are usually songs where the client approved it in the room with me.

How do you handle attended sessions? I’m not ever going to fully stop doing them, because I feel strongly that the music I work on isn’t mine, and the artist should have a say on anything they feel strongly about. But I find that most artists don’t have the attention span to focus on less obvious elements of a mix that matter a lot. For example, artists tend to think a lot about things such as vocal reverb or guitar volume, but they get impatient if I want to spend more than 1 or 2 minutes shaping dynamics and transients on drums. Something that feels minor to them but actually makes a big difference when you zoom out and listen to the song as a whole.

A solid few truly sick days, where you are actually sick and have a genuine excuse to miss out on daily life, is one of the most relaxing times a person can have.

Let me address the main objections I’m expecting: 1. What if you have kids?
2. What if you miss work and really needed those hours?

Yes, of course in those scenarios it sucks, and it adds even more stress to your life. Please don’t kill me. I’m not talking about people in these situations. There should be universal paid sick leave in this country.

In my life specifically, I am constantly being bounced around from either insane amounts of work or insane amounts of social activities. Getting a night to myself with the TV or with book is rare, and I usually have to actively ignore work or friendship obligations to do so. When you’re sick, you get all the time in the world to yourself and no one is allowed to be mad at you or consider you lazy. Even on vacation there is more being asked of you than when you are sick. That level of relaxation is literally worth a fever and sore throat to me.

I don’t understand the obsession with fight videos and I don’t understand people’s nonchalance about fighting in general. Yes, I recognize this doesn’t make me sound tough or cool.

When you actually think about it, it’s insane that anyone would willingly participate in swinging fists as hard as they can at someone else’s head, knowing the same will be done to them. Bones are basically like shittier rocks, and having them smash together at high velocities is so obviously lethal and stupid. Sure, plenty of people make it out with some scrapes and bruises, but people also die sometimes or wind up permanently incapacitated.

Defending yourself from someone attacking you is different of course. I’m talking about random street fights over literal words. I don’t think it’s possible to entertain that idea if your IQ is above 80.

Apologies for a long post, but it requires some explanation and I think it’s worth it:

While working on some mixes today, I was re-importing bounces after every 30 mins or so to keep in my session for reference. I use a mix bus separately from my master channel so I can easily flip between bounces and active session without my master processing being re-applied to the imported bounces.

When A/Bing between a bounce and the identical active session it was bounced from, I noticed the bounce sounded noticeably worse, it was flatter and harsher and literally sounded lossy compared to my session.

I null tested them, and there was a massive delta where I could hear entire vocal passages and kick and snare transients. Maybe no biggie I thought. I have UAD tape emulations running throughout this session, as well as microshift on a vocal double, and the non-linear processing will always bounce differently. But why do my transients suck in the bounce?

I tried online and offline, as well as printing a real time bounce directly onto a new audio track. Nothing nulled with anything, and all the bounces sucked compared to the active session.

I then took off all plugs on my mix bus and tried a null test with that bounce. Same problem.

I then re-engaged all mix bus plugs but instead froze every single track in my session except for the mix bus and did another offline bounce. Lo and behold, the bounce nulled perfectly. Not only that, the bounce actually sounded good! My transients were there and the shitty haze was gone.

Can anyone illuminate what’s happening here? Do I have to do this every time I bounce a final now? This drove me insane today.

This isn’t to say that merit doesn’t matter. Obviously it’s important to be good at what you do, but that is only one dimension of you as a person. The way you relate to others is a skill just like anything else in life.

No one thinks they’ve been cheated when another kid in math class gets straight A’s. The normal response to this is “damn, that kid is good at math.” Why don’t we have this reaction with social skills? Social butterflies often get accused of being fake or sucking up to others, but to me that’s just cope. People with strong social skills have a leg up in office environments in the same way people with good math skills are more likely to get an engineering degree.

There’s nothing wrong with being a disagreeable, shy, or overly blunt person. Lots of amazing people are wired that way. But it’s not “unfair” when people with the opposite personality type from you experience the benefits of playing nicely with others.

I’ve been seeing this critique more often on new releases coming out, even indie releases that aren’t going for a radio sound.

We all have different ears and tastes of course, but it would be interesting to see if there are any common threads in a production that might turn someone off from a song.

Some people will express preference for “raw” recordings for example, but you can find a very wide range of things that people consider raw - all the way from basement recordings with 1 microphone to a song that probably has 80 tracks of audio and tons of editing.

What’s an example of a song from the last 10-15 years that is too polished and would have worked better if left more organic?

Weirdest thing I’ve ever used is a pill bottle as a shaker. Pretty crunchy as you might expect. But I want to hear yours! And possibly steal them.

I run my own small studio recording local bands and I love what I do. I make enough to scrape by in my area. But in many career paths, it seems like the idea is: work your ass off in your 20’s so that your pay continues to increase while your work life balance slowly improves.

I’m starting to realize that the music industry simply doesn’t work that way. My pay actually has increased each year, but 12 hour workdays are a norm each week no matter what I do. I’m not even really a workaholic per se, I enjoy what I do but I also need my down time. When you’re working with a great band who needs to nail that last vocal and it’s 1am, are you really going to call it? Are you going to be known as the studio who calls it and makes them go home when they would need to book a month further out to get a free spot on your calendar?

Just some thoughts going through my head. I see a lot of discouraging posts about this field in here and I actually disagree with them. The demand and work is there if you have the network and work ethic to rise to the occasion. But no one should ever look at music production in the same way they look at a 9-5. You’re either going to make peace with seeing less of your friends and family or you’re going to change paths. The people who are willing to live, eat, and breathe music production will always get more work than the people who set more normal boundaries for themselves. If you are considering this field as a young person, please seriously consider how committed you are. Hope this post isn’t annoying or high and mighty, just telling a truth as it hits me in real time.