What is it with producers/engineers today?

[Michael Douchette]

My wife just now wanted me to listen to a song by one of the "new girls." I did, and after really concentrating, I figured out what the lyrics were saying. Good song, a real shame it's mixed like it is. You can tell what instruments the producer/engineer play, they're the loudest things in the mix. Why is the vocal treated like another instrument, just awash in the mix with other things instead of on top where it should be? Is it because a lot of "songs" are really crappy these days, and more people would know it if the vocal was where it should be? If we all like instruments so much, why don't we start releasing more instrumentals to radio again, and just eliminate those pesky vocalists completely?

[Edward Meisse]

Interesting comment. I went to a local pub a couple of nights ago and the band was mixed like that in a live performance. Everything seemed to be weighted equally. Not only could the words to the song not be clearly heard but the lead instruments didn't stand out above the rythm section. What could these guys be thinking?

[Duane Reese]

Dang - I'd expect a cruddy mix in the bush league of recordings, but not something major. Heck - maybe mixing is becoming a lost art.

[Walter Stettner]

The complete process of creating a record has become sort of a "lost art", IMO. It starts with the song itself, continues with the recording/producing and ends with the final mix.

Listen to some of the classic Billy Sherrill productions from 35 or 40 years ago and you can hear the difference. No drum kick-off in every song (it's a miracle to me why that has started to become the rule), instruments used to enhance and support the vocal and songs that were simple, compared to many songs of today (not 4 chords in every bar), with a melody that you could remember.

Not much left of all these factors today, I think...


Kind Regards, Walter

[Duane Reese]

Makes me wonder if people working in the production are just over-thinking the whole thing...

Today's recordings seem to be a lot of cut-and-paste, tweaking, compressing and messing around for hours until the ears are dead and they couldn't make a satisfying mix to save their lives.

Back in the day, all you needed was a Studer 820 and an API desk, good mics and most importantly, solid talent and you could make a great record. Now it's like rocket science, and yet the results frequently aren't even as good.

Something's wrong...

[Steinar Gregertsen]

Here's how I view the ingredients of good music production. You'll need -

* A good song
* A good arrangement of a good song
* A good performance of a good arrangement of a good song
* A good recording of a good performance of a good arrangement of a good song
* A good mix/master of a good recording of a good performance of a good arrangement of a good song

Unfortunately, too much of todays music production - in commercial 'popular' music - fails on too many of these points. IMVHO.....

[Thomas Stanley]

The trend I find most objectionable in live bands is little to no use of dynamics.

[Leslie Ehrlich]

Why is the vocal treated like another instrument, just awash in the mix with other things instead of on top where it should be? Is it because a lot of "songs" are really crappy these days?

I prefer it that way because I'm not a great singer. All three of my solo albums were recorded with the vocal 'in the mix'. When I write and record songs the lyrics and voices are secondary. It's the guitar work that matters most.

[Jim Hartley]

Mike,

The point you are making is exactly why I listen to very little current country radio. Thank goodness we have a Legends station here I can listen to.

Thomas, that probably is the biggest reason why I don't play with some bands I get asked to work with. As a drummer, it is so frustrating to build to a chorus, then when I drop the volume for the verse, the band looks at me like I quit playing. Maybe though, they play like that because that's what they hear on the radio like Mike mentioned.

Good thread Mike.

See ya soon,
Jim

[Bill Hatcher]

You guys are thinking too much like musicians.

The general public is who buys this stuff. They don't have a clue as to what a good or bad mix is. They don't care which instruments are too loud or anything of the sort. That is why production is so crappy today.

There was a time when country music was so much more simple and clean sounding. Just a snare drum with a brush and a stick and great sounding singers with voices that could carry the entire track with just some sparse fills by clean sounding instruments.

Now you have all the washed up rock and rollers who can't make any of their music work on the radio anymore because of hip hop and they convened on Nashville and unleashed all this crap on the radio audience and stations play it and folks buy it and they have an awards show every year to tout it.

Country music has been dead a long time. The standards for recording and mixing are pretty much out the window. With the advent of home studios EVERYONE is now a so called expert on audio engineering.

You just have to search a little harder to find nice sounding things. There out there.

[David L. Donald]

You think it's bad there.

The BIGGEST pop music lable here,
has a BIG SSL console with full total recall automation.

It has ONE recall setting. MIX.

And they tell ALL the acts recording in different studios to
'USE THIS TRACKING LIST' on the multi track.
If you want acousdtic guitar it's ALWAYS track 8,
and bass on track 1, Lead vocal track 10 etc. etc.

Then they throw the tape on,
run it through the preset SSL console,
while a workstation records the two tracks,
and 'it's mixed'....
No eq changes on reverb changes,
At most the repatch wrongly assigned tracks
to the right track. No one it seems
dares change the original 'working mix' setting
that somebody decided worked years ago.


As top washed up rockers.

Well yeah Hip Hop has gutted the pop music radio market,
but what was rock had already moved into
the country side of things, as retro musical form.

So the rockers just went to where they still
COULD play something they liked.
Some still liked country, but could never do it before.
Some, like Van Morrison, are doing pretty
nice homages to classic country.

I personally think any rocker who looks to country
as a way to continue and make music,
and does it with heart and soul, should be welcomed,
for bringing their older fans with them.

It's funny those formerly big, but now aging
country artists are now also going backwards
in time to their early styles.

The lack of mixing prowess has a lot to do with the lack of training,
and the radio demands for massive compression
to reach highest possible audience numbers.

[Bill Dobkins]

Having an ear for the mix, in my opinion is the most important ingrediant. So many engineers come out of school with the knowledge but don't know what to do with it. They can read a meter but can't hear the sound. I always hate it when I'm watching a big show, like an awards show. The camera man has his instruction sheet, Its time for the guitar player to take his break, the camera pans to him and he's playing his heart out but you can't hear him, Why because they turned the Steel up or the horn section ect.

[David Doggett]

It all goes back to the jam rock stuff that got so popular in the '60s - everybody plays all out all the time, with few real arrangements. I don't mind doing that in bar gigs where everybody just gets loose and has a good time. But I'm running into problems now as some of the bar bands I play with go in the studio to make CDs. They still don't take the discipline to work out arrangements. Even for the overdubs of lead and backing instruments, they just want everybody to noodle around all the way through each song. Then supposedly after all the tracks are laid down, someone will go back in and edit out stuff where they don't want it, and leave what's left. I'm having a real problem with that. Just noodling around I create a lot of poor stuff, and sometimes the good stuff I happen upon is in the wrong place in the song, or it might be in the same spot where somebody else hit some good stuff, and one of us has to get our best stuff cut. It is not at all the same as working up a good lead, coming in on cue, nailing the solo, and backing out. But these guys whose songs we are doing claim they can't think ahead to plan out a real arrangement. Pardon my rant, but I'm now going through this with the second group in a row, and it sucks.

[Clyde Mattocks]

David, I run into situations regularly where I'm called in to overdub, and the producer(?) tells me just to play along all the time and they'll edit it
like they want. When I say suggest how about giving me sections so I can plan an entrance and exit and not walk on the vocalist, I get this blank stare.

However, there are times I am able to convince them
to let me do it in an organized manner.

Another situation I find is the playback in the control room sounds pretty decent, but when they send me a copy of the finished product, everything is covered under a blanket of mud. Few people know how to mix anymore.

One more situation I have covered in a previous post is a producer who will tell me three times before I can ever get my guitar out of the case, "This is not a country seesion, so I don't want much steel, just a little color here and there". Then as soon as the
tracking stars, he becomes so intoxicated with the sound of the steel and what it is doing for the song,
he keeps adding till it is more country than I would
have on a George Jones session.

[Jack Stoner]

I have a singer friend that recorded an album in "Nashvul" a couple of years ago. The studio used musicans that come in after doing other sessions all day (I don't remember what that is called) and it wasn't a bad session. They mixed it like current mixes and gave him the "master CD" (apparently all he paid/bargained for). He wasn't happy with it because the bass and drums were "out front". He brought it to me and asked me if I could do anything with it. I was able to lower the bass slightly using Goldwave audio editing software but there really wasn't a lot I could do since it was a mix. But, he was happy with what I could do.

I've since produced and recorded two albums for him in my "home" studio and getting ready to do another for him.

[David L. Donald]

Jack just goes to show you.

Ya gotta get those master reels
and or hardisks of your tracks.
Why spend the money and NOT have recourse to make
corrections next day. Especially for a whole album.

Most ANY mix will sound MORE flawed after a days reflexion.
Take some time to let the ears cool down.
THEN remix.
Anybody who bargans ONLY for the mix
at the end of the session,
is getting what they deserve.

Rush, rush, shove the fool out the door.
Crap caused by ear and brain fatigue.

These 'We'll record you whole album in a day
with our musicians for $1,000, and give you 3 CD's at the endo of the day.
May look like good deals to the newbie in town,
but are just pure crap in the business.

$250 more and you've paid for 2 master reels.
But; 'Oh no sorry that's not in the deal'.

Ain't heard of ONE label signing from a gig like that.
Maybe a gig on lower Broadway
playing for the tip jar...

Sadly there are to many of these slipshod small studios around, more and more lately,
giving those with good chops
and charging commensurate pricing,
a bad name.

And then a new sort of trained'engineer'
gets grabbed onto by a shyster producer
and they leave a trail of broken hearts across the heartland.

[David Mason]

Too many tracks, too many instruments. I cringe when I read about the producers who are known for their collection of "vintage" stompboxes, guitars and amps, who bring them to the sessions so that the performing monkeys can try them out to get just the "right" sound. When your song sucks, an old fuzztone is bound to help... Guitar Player magazine regularly shows a picture of some 20-something rocker, sitting in a room full of guitars - who can't play, sing or write worth a hoot. I love guitars too, I have too many, but whatever happened to recording an album with one guitar? The Beatles used, what, six?

Nowadays, one song will have six rhythm guitars, four rhythm tracks with acoustic guitars alone, all earnestly synchronized & tuned - but the song sucks. "Sgt. Pepper's" was great because it was recorded on four tracks, not in spite of it. It reminds me of those planes the Air Force designs, where each consulting team keeps adding features until the plane's too heavy to fly. If your guitar solo doesn't have a discernible melody and a lyrical story to tell, quadruple-tracking it with authentic '57 Les Paul Jrs. really isn't going to help it one darn bit....

Q: Have you ever heard of an engineer with a 48-track board, using only 6 or 8 of them to record a CD?

[Bill Hatcher]

Too many tracks, too many instruments. "Sgt. Pepper's" was great because it was recorded on four tracks, not in spite of it.

Dave. If you do some research on "Pepper" you will see that there were 8 tracks used and possibly more. Geoff Emerick the engineer of that record was working with two Studer 1" four track machines. There was all sorts of track bouncing and syncing going on. Pepper would never have sounded like it did just using only four tracks. If you think about the tape width per track--1/4" for each track you can only imagine how much signal could be printed to it. It really is a remarkable sounding recording that changed so much in the pop music world.

[Donny Hinson]

Too many tracks, too many instruments. I cringe when I read about the producers who are known for their collection of "vintage" stompboxes, guitars and amps, who bring them to the sessions so that the performing monkeys can try them out to get just the "right" sound. When your song sucks, an old fuzztone is bound to help... Guitar Player magazine regularly shows a picture of some 20-something rocker, sitting in a room full of guitars - who can't play, sing or write worth a hoot.

I like that!

(But you'd better be careful. People will think we're related.)

The "formula" major label producers use nowadays consists of but two "rules"...

1. More is better.
2. Louder is better.

Any questions?

[Howard Tate]

When did bass and drums become the lead instruments? Even in our gigging group when I play an instrumental, usually one or two a weekend, I have to try to follow the bass, he doesn't follow me. I don't think he can hear me, I can't.

[Michael Douchette]

I prefer it that way because I'm not a great singer. All three of my solo albums were recorded with the vocal 'in the mix'. When I write and record songs the lyrics and voices are secondary. It's the guitar work that matters most.

Leslie, then why not just record instrumentals showcasing your guitar work? Why bother with vocals at all?

Not picking on Leslie at all, but therein lies the pervasive problem, my friends. There is MUCH of this mentality out there, people having bought DVD's of their guitar heroes and being able to learn in two weeks what it took them years to craft, and they can't wait to show off the capabilities they've garnered in a short time. (Again, I stress, this is NOT about Leslie and his ability!) It is much harder, IMO, to learn to sing properly, as pitch control is not governed by frets. Too much effort there. Much easier to copy someone's finger positions.

[John Macy]

There are some really great mixes out there if you look around--love the new Lyle Lovett...

However, the new Springsteen record is pretty much un-listenable to me. I actually mailed mine back to Jon Landau, Bruce's manager, telling him I had no use for it as it was offensive to listen to, and would not be buying any more of the Boss's product in the future. It is so smashed and one dimensional and harsh--a feeling shared by everyone here at the studio we have played it for...

[Steinar Gregertsen]

It is so smashed and one dimensional and harsh--a feeling shared by everyone here at the studio we have played it for...

I haven't heard the whole album, but the stuff I've heard definitely leaves the impression that it's another victim of the Loudness War. That's really too bad and a complete waste now that the 'loudness' trend seem to be turning (finally)..

Steinar

[Marc Jenkins]

However, the new Springsteen record is pretty much un-listenable to me.

I wholeheartedly agree, John. It's really too bad, as these are great performances and great songs, but I only made it through the record twice. I just found it so harsh and headache-inducing, even at low volume!

[Leslie Ehrlich]

Leslie, then why not just record instrumentals showcasing your guitar work? Why bother with vocals at all?

But sometimes I like singing. I like to strike a balance between all the major parts in a recording as far as volumes go. A lead vocal track is one of them. There are also minor parts such as second rhythm guitars, vocal harmonies, sound effects, etc, that I turn down a bit so the more essential ingredients remain in the foreground. But I don't like a lead vocal track way out front. It should blend in with the music.