Qupe-Eurovision challengers

[jeffd42]

Now the rough mix is somewhat ready and and she compares it (level matched) to the reference track for the first time, which happens to be an international commercial contemporary pop song. It's an 'return to earth' call....She returns to her mix, and starts to apply all those dirty tricks from those YouTube tutorials. Smiley eq, transient enhancing compression, serial, parallel, levelling compression, limiting, saturation, side chaining, emphasis processing, delays, reverbs, stereo imaging, creative effects, subgrouping, automation etc etc, she does all the hard work that requires actions and subjective decisions. Now she thinks she has the best mix ever, and still working at the -23 LUFS level. And she compares it to the pop hit, and it endures the test.

Kapu, that was an excellent article ... it captures the real world workflow perfectly.

One aspect often missed in the search for "authenticity" is that many of the processing "tricks" are aimed at making the mix seem closer to live.

A recorded track removes two degrees of freedom: (a) performance dynamics (most listening environments have a noise floor, if one is lucky, <25db below RMS); and, (b) most playback environments are frequency constrained (lows and/or highs disappear) -- yet, the mix must still sound good.

All of the most common mix techniques -- compression, distortion, transient enhancing -- suggest more dynamic range than is present (such as a particular vocal line distorting, suggesting how loudly it was originally sung). The movement of true lows into low-mids exploits the missing fundamental effect; ducking/pumping exploits how the ear reacts to loud transients at a concert or club. Pushing energy into the 5KHz region suggests that there is more happening above than might be reproduced on many systems.

I think we find these treatments pleasing precisely because they emulate, at lower volume, how we hear sounds at high volume. They are familiar auditory responses.

Anyways! This was meant to be a brief comment. My point is that we shouldn't assume mix processing is there to take away from the performance, but rather that it can act to better preserve the essential musical elements despite the constraints inherent to the transmission medium.

I'm always in awe of how the great mixing engineers assemble mixes that translate perfectly across all shapes and sizes of playback systems. Definitely an art, rather than a science, there.