Thinking aloud about mixing techniques in recording. To each their own, but I don't know about you... I wouldn't be caught dead playing a pointy-neck guitar with a straight face.

Roger Lavallee
Patchbay
roger@curtainsociety.com

I have been thinking about this for a while now.

I started recording myself back when chorus was king, and everyone loved big wet mixes. You needed a napkin if you were listening to the latest CD. Drums consisted of a SNARE DRUM and the other stuff. At the time, I loved that sound. (side note, it was the stereo effects I heard in my headphones on an old Rush song that made me WANT to engineer in the first place!)

So I did that. I tripletracked guitars, then I'd gloss them up with chorus, and I'd put stereo effects on the vocals, and make those background vocals so wide that you needed fifty feet of speaker cable in order to fully appreciate them.

Then tastes changed in the 90s and this sort of "lo-fi" thing came into the picture. Dryness and compression equals IMPACT and POWER! Reverb sucks. Get it away from me. Nothing sounds more "80's" than digital reverb..... blah blah blah.

Obviously, your personal taste can't be argued because you like what you like, but up until a couple of years ago, you could not make a record that was "effecty" and chorusy and reverby without sounding totally uncool and dated (I know you have a million examples to prove me wrong, but bear with me)

(*side note, funny how compression and distortion has taken over as "effecty" in place of delays and reverb and chorusing.... You might not automatically think of compression in the same category as reverb, but the '00s are becoming the decade of overcompression and distortion, just like the 80's were for gated reverb and chorusing.... this just occurred to me as I proof-read this post)

Now the 80's are back, not only in cover song choices, but new bands that are taking their cues from early 80's britrock bands and late 70's new wave. It's all of a sudden becoming charming again to have that retro chorusy guitar sound and use reverb.

Granted these records try to make it sound new and refreshing, but it's still chorusing, flanging, long delays and reverb and the Jesus and Mary Chain are still too fresh in my memory to think the Raveonettes sound unique.

Anyway, commentary aside, I've spent years weaning myself out of the habit of "I have to put at least a tiny bit of room reverb on the mix to get things to settle in together" in order to celebrate the joys of dry mixes and even sometimes mono mixes. To be honest, it taught me to use the room more and get the ambience out of live bleed, omni mics, etc.

That said, I still LOVE stereo. It's one of my favorite things in life: hearing wide stereo mixes. The best stereo mixes to me are ones with creative layering and lots of ear candy, not just effects, so I'll just get that out of the way.

So lately, I'm doing these records with kind of straight ahead rootsy bands.... singer songwriters, or r&b rock bands, or alt-country bands.... not places where you automatically think about effects or stereoness. I'm doing mixes with this bone dry vocal up the middle, panning the lead guitar kinda to the right, and the rhythm kinda to the left and double tracked acoustics hard left and right.... that sort of thing. It's a nice balance and it works. The tracks aren't "produced" to hell, so the instrumentation and arragements are pretty straightforward.

Then I listen in headphones and I feel like "geez, I wish there was some sort of effect on the vocal to make it stereo and sit in a little bit, and maybe something to make those lead and rhythm guitars feel like they're in the same room together...." Then I stop myself and say "remember what Weezer said. Reverb is for Sissies."

Then I listen to other cool contemporary records, indie and major, and I hear processing on the vocals, and these big reverbs on steel guitars lines, and stuff like that. Then I remember what Bart Simpson said: You can't make friends with reverb.

I know I'm being extreme here, and I will always do whatever I want to a mix to get it to sound the way I want to hear it sound, but you have to admit that as times change, there is always a wave of techniques that are in or out at a given time. Some chance-takers will buck the trend and use a DX-7 piano even when there's a baby grand at their fingertips, and some will plug their guitar right into a Rockman and not even be ironic about it. I think that takes some guts.

There are certainly some mixers out there who were great at doing that thing in the 80s, and they probably don't get much work nowadays because they never changed their style with the trends....or are they? I can picture some new up and comer calling up So-and-So saying "dude, we loved what you did on that Flesh For Lulu record back in '86. Will you do our new record?" Boy will they be surprised when they're doing it in the band's garage on Nuendo with a bunch of plug-ins!

So I guess I'm just ranting here and I'll probably get some equally as extreme responses (like I said, I'm not really this black-and-white about the issue, but I was just thinking aloud...) So my question is, which takes more nerve: leaving the guitars dry and panned, and the vocal dry and mono, or putting that touch of fake Alesis room reverb on there to make it seem like it's in the same space and ironically (to my ears) a little more "natural"? Is it okay if I think the dry mix sounds a little demoey and the reverbed mix sounds like a "record" or would your tastes dictate that it's the other way around?

Discuss

Roger