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Ross Hogarth talks about mixing ADKOT
How did your musical background come into play with A Different Kind of Truth? It is a diverse album. Did you draw from your vocabulary while engineering?
Musically, people place Van Halen in a category and call it heavy metal, which I think is absolutely, completely misplaced. Their essence, if you take the stylistic influences of the members of Van Halen, inclusive of David Lee Roth, there’s such incredible classic influences, considering that Ed and Al were brought up as classical piano players and some of their favorite music is Led Zeppelin or Eric Clapton or classic blues. And then you take Dave, where he comes from musically. So for me, being brought into a Van Halen record was in a lot of ways a comfortable musical bed to lie in because there was no part of this record that felt foreign on any level. Like you say, there are so many influences and elements that go from heavy hard rock and prog to classic music, and Dave’s quirky tongue-in-cheek lyrics, like the intro to “Stay Frosty” or whatever. There’s so much that I could make a meal out of, and that’s an amazing place to be as an engineer and a mixer and a person that loves what I do. To have a project that I could literally make a huge meal out of was like Thanksgiving dinner, so there was nothing foreign to me about working on this music.
And it’s your classic three-piece rock band, too — the concept of making instruments big and not have to fight through a zillion overdubs to figure out where to place stuff. It’s like, how do you give each element of the band a voice of their own? That’s the thing that’s always made Van Halen, and on this record, the goal was the upgrade of certain elements — giving Wolfie his own voice as a bass player, giving the bass a voice or sound that people go, “Wow, haven’t heard that before, haven’t heard that on a Van Halen record before,” but not to the point that they say, “That doesn’t sound like Van Halen.” The intention was to give each member of the band the voice they have, and from a mix standpoint, don’t take the familiar away from the listener, but don’t make it sound so familiar that it sounds like you’re trying to emulate something from the past. Do something that sounds effortless. I’m not blowing my own horn. I’m talking about the intention. I’m not one to judge the result. I’m talking about coming into something as an intention. This is a classic band that’s in the DNA of the world’s music. You can’t deny that, so when you’re living into that legacy, the whole intention has to be, “What can I do here not to screw it up? What can I do to embellish it?” It was a pleasant and incredible challenge on a good level. This amazing groove, this great guitar player, you’ve got Dave singing great lyrics, he’s hilarious, he’s deep. Every time I heard the songs, I would find a new lyric. Like “The Trouble With Never,” just the title — how many people talk about never? Never going to do that again. Never see me there again. Never going to talk to him again. “That’s the trouble with never” — just the concept of never. Then he gets into “selective amnesia” and that whole breakdown. How do you take it and make it sound cool and not too campy? How much delay do I make swim around everything? How Twilight Zone/Rod Serling do I make his voice? That’s fun, that’s a blast — give me that any day of the week.
Does your background growing up as the son of an artist affect how you produce or engineer in any way?
It’s about imagery. My dad brought me up around a lot of art. He walked me around museums around the world when we were fortunate enough to have people pay for family trips to have him go sign books in Italy and in Paris. He was an incredible art historian and he’d explain to me what was in the paintings, so I’m very visual as an engineer/mixer/music-maker. I like to close my eyes and just push “play.” I like to close my eyes, period, and make sure that I can see inside the mix and see inside the songs. So this was a blast because of the three dimensions of music that are occurring with this all the time. Van Halen is a very three-dimensional band. There are incredible dimensions to each and every aspect of the instruments, the people, the dynamics and the history. There are all these dimensions and you have to live inside of them. It’s not a simple task of “go mix a record.”
Starting with the sonics, Alex loves John Bonham’s drums and wants his to sound like Led Zeppelin, but Led Zeppelin never had the amount of distortion and the amount of size and the guitars that Eddie has, so right off the bat, just getting the guitars to fit into a drum sound that sounds like John Bonham — because we all know that Alex is like the torch that John Bonham left, and there’s an element to Alex that’s like a mixture between Keith Moon, John Bonham and Elvin Jones or some jazz kind of thing. They’re coming from the same place. He plays a double-headed, 26-inch kick drum, and that’s a lot of resonance, so how do you get that to speak through heavy guitars but still not sound like heavy metal, where all you hear is the front attack of the beater? When we listen to modern, heavy rock music, kick drums are like the sound of tack-tack-tack, and that’s not Van Halen. So you have to have an articulation in the sound, and that’s a challenge. Anytime there’s a double kick drum, that’s a challenge to get it to speak, and to record it and to mix it. It’s a challenge to record rock guitars, heavy rock guitars, and have low end but not too much low end, and have mid-range. These are always challenges, period, as an engineer, so to get those things captured and have the band’s opinion, when someone specifically says, “I want it to sound this way,” you have to live within the confines of what can and can’t be done. John Bonham’s literal drum sound would never work with Van Halen because of the size of the guitar, the size of the bass, the amount of distortion on the bass. John Paul Jones never had that amount of distortion. So those are interesting challenges.
How did you work to give each musician a voice?
With Ed, two heads and two cabinets. The Royer ribbon mics were a big part of it for low end. I love the Royers. I love what they do on the mixture of low end and midrange that I cannot get out of a dynamic mic. I’ve used ribbon mics for my whole career. I was fortunate when I started recording that there were good RCA and Beyer ribbon mics in the mic cabinets, particularly at Rumbo, the Captain and Tennille’s studio, one of the first studios I had a staff engineering position in. I’m on record as saying that with Motley Crue we were blowing up the ribbon mics on a daily basis. I brought them into the picture on their Girls, Girls, Girls album. The ribbon mics do something that dynamics mics don’t do: they have harmonic distortion that they create by the ribbon vibrating, so on electric guitars they’re particularly amazing, but they can’t be used on heavy guitars because you blow them up. Most older ribbon mics you can’t put next to a Shure SM57 — you end up blowing them up, so you have to put them farther back and then they’re out of phase. Royer came up with a microphone and a ribbon that can be put right in phase with a 57 and you don’t blow up the microphone, you’re not stretching the ribbons out. I brought those to the party with Ed and they did something that he hadn’t yet done because he’d never made a record with those microphones on his cabinets.
Which Royers did you use?
The 122V, which is the tube ribbon they have. [http://www.royerlabs.com/R-122V.html] It’s the same system as the 121 and 122 ribbons. They took that same design — the difference in those two mics is phantom power is applied to the 122 — and they decided that they could upgrade the 122v to a tube. It’s a great concept because now you have a tube amplifier and it gives it a whole other level of detail and it can be put on a rock cabinet. I brought that to the table, and I brought a certain upgrade to the bass sound just by virtue of wanting to be part of helping it as far as understanding distortion on bass and how important it is.
Could you elaborate?
Eddie and Wolfie were definitely working on the bass sound together when I arrived, as far as a Marshall or an EVH, and what they were using and how they were distorting it. When you have a lot of distortion, sometimes you don’t have low end, and you have to capture low end too. As an engineer, I brought my experience in making all kinds of records, particularly as far as the bass. I did a fair amount of really hard rock and heavy metal in the last decade, producing Coal Chamber and Devil Driver, and when you’re into low tuning, you’ve got to have a lot of distortion on the bass to cut through. Being a drummer and having classic rock ears, when Alex is telling me what he wants out of the drums, I totally get it. Now, how do we capture it? There are probably a thousand guys out there that might be the right guy for the gig. I’m just the guy that got called. Call it fate or good luck for me. I have to say, man, what a pleasure. I started in early 2010 and they brought me back at the end of March 2011. I was on it until I finished mixing it, and in late fall we finished mastering at Bernie Grundman’s.
What was involved in engineering/mixing this album?
One of the things I’m most proud of is the guitar and bass on the record. I feel I had a lot of involvement in both of those areas, particularly bringing out Eddie’s width, the stereo, how wide his guitar sound is, but it’s still one performance. I’m super-proud of working on that with him and getting something that I hope he really likes. I think he does. At one point in recording, it was, “We don’t want the guitar on the left with the reverb going on the right, like it always was.” It may be urban legend and not a totally historic story. But as the story goes, somewhere after the first record came out, they were listening to the record and someone’s left speaker was not working. The main guitar was panned left, so there was no guitar. They were listening to the record with no guitar and Eddie was freaked out. How many people don’t have a left-side speaker? But if the guitar is only panned to the left and the speaker is broken, you’re not going to have any guitars, so he never wanted that again. There were things that they didn’t want, or wanted, and one of the things that Alex said was, “If the guitar is going to be mono, I don’t want it just coming down the middle too. I want it to have dimension.” It was sort of like, “Where’s the happy medium?” So Ed, throughout his career, had worked with how to split his sound with delays and harmonizers.
I came in and I had a different concept. I said, “Let’s use two heads and two cabinets and let’s try these ribbon mics, which I don’t think you’ve ever used.” I came in with a concept of something to try. If it didn’t work, he would have said he didn’t like it. I wouldn’t have been the guy saying, “You’ve got to use it.” I came in, created an atmosphere of open-mindedness and I tried something, and we worked and honed it to the point that he was really pleased with it. Because Ed’s not going to do anything that he doesn’t like. He can make his own records; he doesn’t need me or anybody, really. Ed is a brilliant engineer and producer with amazing instincts. I’m not so unique as to say that I’m the only guy on the planet who can make a Van Halen record that Eddie’s happy with. Eddie Van Halen can make his own records. He doesn’t need anybody. He’s brilliant. But I came in and I brought something to the table that he liked.
And then Wolfie said, “I want more low end out of the bass.” I said, “OK. You’re using this one amp, but if we use that amp and we mic a port on the back end, flip it out of phase and try that, you’re going to get the sub low that you don’t ever get.” We tried that and he thought it was cool. So that’s my gig: to assess a situation and not rip it up and start over, but to build on what they had in my own way with, “Let’s try this and let’s try that.” So the thing I’m really proud of is that relationship. That was awesome. It has been one of the high points of my whole life to work with one of the most influential bands, for me, just as far as music I like, as far as considering Ed one of the greatest guitar players ever to be born on this planet. I believe him to be, without waxing too poetically, whether it be the Mozart, the Beethoven, the whatever of our day and age. He has done things that no one ever did before he ever showed up. To work with someone like that, and also he’s a sweet and great and cool human being, man, that’s like having my cake and eating it too. Alex is an amazing talent, as a drummer and a brilliant person. He’s an incredible conversationalist and always has something fresh to talk about every time I talk to him. Alex and Ed so amazingly complement each other, and then there’s Wolfie, and man, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That kid is an amazing drummer, an amazing guitar player, a terrific singer and an amazing bass player. He absolutely is a very crucial part of the band now. His musical vocabulary at that young age is incredible, and to go into that situation with those guys … . Then you add into the mix this record coming out with David Lee Roth for the first time in that many years — my whole attitude was, “What do I do to keep this successful? What do I do to keep this moving forward?”
What did you do to keep it moving forward?
Show up. Take everything in stride and take nothing personally. Literally, you show up and you talk straight, act straight, and you look people in the eye. These guys see through bullshit. There’s a side of the Van Halens, and Dave, that has been there and done that and they can see that. You show up, and you don’t show up when you’re not needed. Don’t put yourself somewhere you don’t need to be, don’t put yourself inside conversations when you don’t need to be there, and don’t overstep your bounds when you don’t need to. I didn’t go up there and say, “This is what you need to do.” You do it bit by bit and time and place. You’ve got to know your situation.
When you began producing and engineering, people listened on home stereos and in their cars. Now they listen on mobile phones, computers and through earbuds. Has this changed the way you mix? Do you mix for different mediums?
I mixed A Different Kind Of Truth back to Pro Tools at the higher sample rate, which is 96k, even though the record was recorded at 44.1/24, so I tried to capture the mix at a higher sample rate, which is better, regardless, through a good Burl converter. It’s got kind of a fat transformer sound. I like the Crane Song also. I use that at my studio, but the Burl seemed to be a good choice, it’s highly recommended, a lot of people think it’s cool, so I tried it and it sounded good and we were happy with it. So we did 96k and you have to reduce it to 44.1/16 — those are CDs. That’s where we’re at; we got stuck there a long time ago by the video guys who all decided that music sound should be at 44.1/16 bit, and now they’ve changed their minds and they’re using 48.1/24 bit and we’re still stuck at 44.1/16. It sucks because it’s definitely already bit reduced, and if you buy on iTunes, you’re buying it at 256 AAC or MP3. It used to be 192 MP3or AAC, which sounds a little better, but if you’re on a PC, you can’t play AAC, so you’re stuck with MP3’s. And so what am I mixing for? Am I mixing for the lowest common denominator or the highest common denominator or somewhere in between? It’s definitely a problem these days. I honestly do not have an answer. It’s like, what am I actually doing here? Am I mixing for people with earbuds? For people with home stereo? There’s still people who have 5.1’s, so what’s going to happen when my stereo mix gets derived into a 5.1 mix? So I try to just mix for the most solid stereo high-resolution sound, knowing that when I bring it to mastering, he’s going to put level on it and not crush it to the nth degree so that it completely changes the mix and it sounds like your mastering engineer mixed your record for you. You want it to stay and sound like music until the end result, but I have to say that no one will ever hear a record like it was mixed and recorded these days unless you have vinyl. When it was just vinyl, we knew what vinyl was going to do, so you could always cut a vinyl ref and know exactly what it was going to do. For the most part, the world is listening on their computers and earbuds and little speakers, so you have to make sure that something translates down into that world, but if we’re just mixing for the lowest common denominator, then I might as well throw half my engineering skills out the window and say, “Forget it. Why should I even care if it sounds good?” because the compressed sound of MP3’s is pretty bizarre. Or can be pretty bizarre. It can take a lot of size and dimension away from a mix, so you definitely have to know what’s going to happen when it does that, but if you’re just mixing for that, then I think you’re still missing the boat too. It’s a tough one.
LINK
Musically, people place Van Halen in a category and call it heavy metal, which I think is absolutely, completely misplaced. Their essence, if you take the stylistic influences of the members of Van Halen, inclusive of David Lee Roth, there’s such incredible classic influences, considering that Ed and Al were brought up as classical piano players and some of their favorite music is Led Zeppelin or Eric Clapton or classic blues. And then you take Dave, where he comes from musically. So for me, being brought into a Van Halen record was in a lot of ways a comfortable musical bed to lie in because there was no part of this record that felt foreign on any level. Like you say, there are so many influences and elements that go from heavy hard rock and prog to classic music, and Dave’s quirky tongue-in-cheek lyrics, like the intro to “Stay Frosty” or whatever. There’s so much that I could make a meal out of, and that’s an amazing place to be as an engineer and a mixer and a person that loves what I do. To have a project that I could literally make a huge meal out of was like Thanksgiving dinner, so there was nothing foreign to me about working on this music.
And it’s your classic three-piece rock band, too — the concept of making instruments big and not have to fight through a zillion overdubs to figure out where to place stuff. It’s like, how do you give each element of the band a voice of their own? That’s the thing that’s always made Van Halen, and on this record, the goal was the upgrade of certain elements — giving Wolfie his own voice as a bass player, giving the bass a voice or sound that people go, “Wow, haven’t heard that before, haven’t heard that on a Van Halen record before,” but not to the point that they say, “That doesn’t sound like Van Halen.” The intention was to give each member of the band the voice they have, and from a mix standpoint, don’t take the familiar away from the listener, but don’t make it sound so familiar that it sounds like you’re trying to emulate something from the past. Do something that sounds effortless. I’m not blowing my own horn. I’m talking about the intention. I’m not one to judge the result. I’m talking about coming into something as an intention. This is a classic band that’s in the DNA of the world’s music. You can’t deny that, so when you’re living into that legacy, the whole intention has to be, “What can I do here not to screw it up? What can I do to embellish it?” It was a pleasant and incredible challenge on a good level. This amazing groove, this great guitar player, you’ve got Dave singing great lyrics, he’s hilarious, he’s deep. Every time I heard the songs, I would find a new lyric. Like “The Trouble With Never,” just the title — how many people talk about never? Never going to do that again. Never see me there again. Never going to talk to him again. “That’s the trouble with never” — just the concept of never. Then he gets into “selective amnesia” and that whole breakdown. How do you take it and make it sound cool and not too campy? How much delay do I make swim around everything? How Twilight Zone/Rod Serling do I make his voice? That’s fun, that’s a blast — give me that any day of the week.
Does your background growing up as the son of an artist affect how you produce or engineer in any way?
It’s about imagery. My dad brought me up around a lot of art. He walked me around museums around the world when we were fortunate enough to have people pay for family trips to have him go sign books in Italy and in Paris. He was an incredible art historian and he’d explain to me what was in the paintings, so I’m very visual as an engineer/mixer/music-maker. I like to close my eyes and just push “play.” I like to close my eyes, period, and make sure that I can see inside the mix and see inside the songs. So this was a blast because of the three dimensions of music that are occurring with this all the time. Van Halen is a very three-dimensional band. There are incredible dimensions to each and every aspect of the instruments, the people, the dynamics and the history. There are all these dimensions and you have to live inside of them. It’s not a simple task of “go mix a record.”
Starting with the sonics, Alex loves John Bonham’s drums and wants his to sound like Led Zeppelin, but Led Zeppelin never had the amount of distortion and the amount of size and the guitars that Eddie has, so right off the bat, just getting the guitars to fit into a drum sound that sounds like John Bonham — because we all know that Alex is like the torch that John Bonham left, and there’s an element to Alex that’s like a mixture between Keith Moon, John Bonham and Elvin Jones or some jazz kind of thing. They’re coming from the same place. He plays a double-headed, 26-inch kick drum, and that’s a lot of resonance, so how do you get that to speak through heavy guitars but still not sound like heavy metal, where all you hear is the front attack of the beater? When we listen to modern, heavy rock music, kick drums are like the sound of tack-tack-tack, and that’s not Van Halen. So you have to have an articulation in the sound, and that’s a challenge. Anytime there’s a double kick drum, that’s a challenge to get it to speak, and to record it and to mix it. It’s a challenge to record rock guitars, heavy rock guitars, and have low end but not too much low end, and have mid-range. These are always challenges, period, as an engineer, so to get those things captured and have the band’s opinion, when someone specifically says, “I want it to sound this way,” you have to live within the confines of what can and can’t be done. John Bonham’s literal drum sound would never work with Van Halen because of the size of the guitar, the size of the bass, the amount of distortion on the bass. John Paul Jones never had that amount of distortion. So those are interesting challenges.
How did you work to give each musician a voice?
With Ed, two heads and two cabinets. The Royer ribbon mics were a big part of it for low end. I love the Royers. I love what they do on the mixture of low end and midrange that I cannot get out of a dynamic mic. I’ve used ribbon mics for my whole career. I was fortunate when I started recording that there were good RCA and Beyer ribbon mics in the mic cabinets, particularly at Rumbo, the Captain and Tennille’s studio, one of the first studios I had a staff engineering position in. I’m on record as saying that with Motley Crue we were blowing up the ribbon mics on a daily basis. I brought them into the picture on their Girls, Girls, Girls album. The ribbon mics do something that dynamics mics don’t do: they have harmonic distortion that they create by the ribbon vibrating, so on electric guitars they’re particularly amazing, but they can’t be used on heavy guitars because you blow them up. Most older ribbon mics you can’t put next to a Shure SM57 — you end up blowing them up, so you have to put them farther back and then they’re out of phase. Royer came up with a microphone and a ribbon that can be put right in phase with a 57 and you don’t blow up the microphone, you’re not stretching the ribbons out. I brought those to the party with Ed and they did something that he hadn’t yet done because he’d never made a record with those microphones on his cabinets.
Which Royers did you use?
The 122V, which is the tube ribbon they have. [http://www.royerlabs.com/R-122V.html] It’s the same system as the 121 and 122 ribbons. They took that same design — the difference in those two mics is phantom power is applied to the 122 — and they decided that they could upgrade the 122v to a tube. It’s a great concept because now you have a tube amplifier and it gives it a whole other level of detail and it can be put on a rock cabinet. I brought that to the table, and I brought a certain upgrade to the bass sound just by virtue of wanting to be part of helping it as far as understanding distortion on bass and how important it is.
Could you elaborate?
Eddie and Wolfie were definitely working on the bass sound together when I arrived, as far as a Marshall or an EVH, and what they were using and how they were distorting it. When you have a lot of distortion, sometimes you don’t have low end, and you have to capture low end too. As an engineer, I brought my experience in making all kinds of records, particularly as far as the bass. I did a fair amount of really hard rock and heavy metal in the last decade, producing Coal Chamber and Devil Driver, and when you’re into low tuning, you’ve got to have a lot of distortion on the bass to cut through. Being a drummer and having classic rock ears, when Alex is telling me what he wants out of the drums, I totally get it. Now, how do we capture it? There are probably a thousand guys out there that might be the right guy for the gig. I’m just the guy that got called. Call it fate or good luck for me. I have to say, man, what a pleasure. I started in early 2010 and they brought me back at the end of March 2011. I was on it until I finished mixing it, and in late fall we finished mastering at Bernie Grundman’s.
What was involved in engineering/mixing this album?
One of the things I’m most proud of is the guitar and bass on the record. I feel I had a lot of involvement in both of those areas, particularly bringing out Eddie’s width, the stereo, how wide his guitar sound is, but it’s still one performance. I’m super-proud of working on that with him and getting something that I hope he really likes. I think he does. At one point in recording, it was, “We don’t want the guitar on the left with the reverb going on the right, like it always was.” It may be urban legend and not a totally historic story. But as the story goes, somewhere after the first record came out, they were listening to the record and someone’s left speaker was not working. The main guitar was panned left, so there was no guitar. They were listening to the record with no guitar and Eddie was freaked out. How many people don’t have a left-side speaker? But if the guitar is only panned to the left and the speaker is broken, you’re not going to have any guitars, so he never wanted that again. There were things that they didn’t want, or wanted, and one of the things that Alex said was, “If the guitar is going to be mono, I don’t want it just coming down the middle too. I want it to have dimension.” It was sort of like, “Where’s the happy medium?” So Ed, throughout his career, had worked with how to split his sound with delays and harmonizers.
I came in and I had a different concept. I said, “Let’s use two heads and two cabinets and let’s try these ribbon mics, which I don’t think you’ve ever used.” I came in with a concept of something to try. If it didn’t work, he would have said he didn’t like it. I wouldn’t have been the guy saying, “You’ve got to use it.” I came in, created an atmosphere of open-mindedness and I tried something, and we worked and honed it to the point that he was really pleased with it. Because Ed’s not going to do anything that he doesn’t like. He can make his own records; he doesn’t need me or anybody, really. Ed is a brilliant engineer and producer with amazing instincts. I’m not so unique as to say that I’m the only guy on the planet who can make a Van Halen record that Eddie’s happy with. Eddie Van Halen can make his own records. He doesn’t need anybody. He’s brilliant. But I came in and I brought something to the table that he liked.
And then Wolfie said, “I want more low end out of the bass.” I said, “OK. You’re using this one amp, but if we use that amp and we mic a port on the back end, flip it out of phase and try that, you’re going to get the sub low that you don’t ever get.” We tried that and he thought it was cool. So that’s my gig: to assess a situation and not rip it up and start over, but to build on what they had in my own way with, “Let’s try this and let’s try that.” So the thing I’m really proud of is that relationship. That was awesome. It has been one of the high points of my whole life to work with one of the most influential bands, for me, just as far as music I like, as far as considering Ed one of the greatest guitar players ever to be born on this planet. I believe him to be, without waxing too poetically, whether it be the Mozart, the Beethoven, the whatever of our day and age. He has done things that no one ever did before he ever showed up. To work with someone like that, and also he’s a sweet and great and cool human being, man, that’s like having my cake and eating it too. Alex is an amazing talent, as a drummer and a brilliant person. He’s an incredible conversationalist and always has something fresh to talk about every time I talk to him. Alex and Ed so amazingly complement each other, and then there’s Wolfie, and man, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That kid is an amazing drummer, an amazing guitar player, a terrific singer and an amazing bass player. He absolutely is a very crucial part of the band now. His musical vocabulary at that young age is incredible, and to go into that situation with those guys … . Then you add into the mix this record coming out with David Lee Roth for the first time in that many years — my whole attitude was, “What do I do to keep this successful? What do I do to keep this moving forward?”
What did you do to keep it moving forward?
Show up. Take everything in stride and take nothing personally. Literally, you show up and you talk straight, act straight, and you look people in the eye. These guys see through bullshit. There’s a side of the Van Halens, and Dave, that has been there and done that and they can see that. You show up, and you don’t show up when you’re not needed. Don’t put yourself somewhere you don’t need to be, don’t put yourself inside conversations when you don’t need to be there, and don’t overstep your bounds when you don’t need to. I didn’t go up there and say, “This is what you need to do.” You do it bit by bit and time and place. You’ve got to know your situation.
When you began producing and engineering, people listened on home stereos and in their cars. Now they listen on mobile phones, computers and through earbuds. Has this changed the way you mix? Do you mix for different mediums?
I mixed A Different Kind Of Truth back to Pro Tools at the higher sample rate, which is 96k, even though the record was recorded at 44.1/24, so I tried to capture the mix at a higher sample rate, which is better, regardless, through a good Burl converter. It’s got kind of a fat transformer sound. I like the Crane Song also. I use that at my studio, but the Burl seemed to be a good choice, it’s highly recommended, a lot of people think it’s cool, so I tried it and it sounded good and we were happy with it. So we did 96k and you have to reduce it to 44.1/16 — those are CDs. That’s where we’re at; we got stuck there a long time ago by the video guys who all decided that music sound should be at 44.1/16 bit, and now they’ve changed their minds and they’re using 48.1/24 bit and we’re still stuck at 44.1/16. It sucks because it’s definitely already bit reduced, and if you buy on iTunes, you’re buying it at 256 AAC or MP3. It used to be 192 MP3or AAC, which sounds a little better, but if you’re on a PC, you can’t play AAC, so you’re stuck with MP3’s. And so what am I mixing for? Am I mixing for the lowest common denominator or the highest common denominator or somewhere in between? It’s definitely a problem these days. I honestly do not have an answer. It’s like, what am I actually doing here? Am I mixing for people with earbuds? For people with home stereo? There’s still people who have 5.1’s, so what’s going to happen when my stereo mix gets derived into a 5.1 mix? So I try to just mix for the most solid stereo high-resolution sound, knowing that when I bring it to mastering, he’s going to put level on it and not crush it to the nth degree so that it completely changes the mix and it sounds like your mastering engineer mixed your record for you. You want it to stay and sound like music until the end result, but I have to say that no one will ever hear a record like it was mixed and recorded these days unless you have vinyl. When it was just vinyl, we knew what vinyl was going to do, so you could always cut a vinyl ref and know exactly what it was going to do. For the most part, the world is listening on their computers and earbuds and little speakers, so you have to make sure that something translates down into that world, but if we’re just mixing for the lowest common denominator, then I might as well throw half my engineering skills out the window and say, “Forget it. Why should I even care if it sounds good?” because the compressed sound of MP3’s is pretty bizarre. Or can be pretty bizarre. It can take a lot of size and dimension away from a mix, so you definitely have to know what’s going to happen when it does that, but if you’re just mixing for that, then I think you’re still missing the boat too. It’s a tough one.
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