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Clarity in Collaboration: How to Keep Artists and Producers on the Same Page in a Mix

Sep 02, 2024

To work well with others in the studio, we need to be able to speak to each other clearly to understand how to get the sounds people hear in their heads coming out through the speakers. Here are a range of common requests artists and musicians ask for along with how producers and mixing engineers should interpret them and act on them.

Clarity in Collaboration: How to Keep Artists and Producers on the Same Page in a Mix

Communication is key to a successful artist & mix engineer/producer partnership. Usually, both parties are passionate about music, so they have a shared language based on theory and taste which can make collaboration easy to start off with. However, when collaboration moves into the control room for the mix, things can start to change between the creative artist and technically minded producer.

When mixing a record, technical workflows can drive a lot of the communication. This is where a musician or solo artist may lack some knowledge. Understanding the technical aspects of music production and mixing helps people appreciate some of the trade-offs and limitations that can arise. In the spirit of working better together, here are some ‘translations’ for common miscommunications between artists and producers, to help both sides work together more fluidly.

“I want to hear more of myself”

Translation: They’re self conscious, but don’t let it affect the mix.

The top request from an artist about a mix is usually to turn their part up. Guitarists may want you to give a few extra dB to their solo and rhythm parts; vocalists might want even more spotlight to shine on them; and drummers may demand the nuance of their ghost notes to be simply louder… because they’re cool, right?. Notice a pattern?

I want to hear more of myself

If you listened to everyone and turned all their parts up, you’d be roughly where you started your mix… only louder with fewer options. The whole point of mixing is to avoid doing exactly that. Also, given that each instrumentalist or singer feels they want to hear their own part more, it’s hard not to write it off as a psychological preference rather than a real direction for mixing a track.

This is a comment that the producer can’t ignore, but what should you do? One tactic is to give the musician a temporary boost just to hear themselves for a while, then return their channel back down, demonstrating that it’s masking another element, and appealing to their sense of fairness.

“It is/isn’t too far away/close enough”

Translation: The depth and space of the mix might need some attention.

Distance and depth are touchy subjects in music production. If mixing is about frequencies, levels, panning and depth, then the first three have obvious controls to change them, and the other remains a mystery to many. So if your musician feels an element of the mix is too close, too far away, or anything in between, what’s a producer to do?

Words like ‘presence’ and ‘space’ sometimes have a corresponding knob on a piece of hardware or software, but these are rarely a cure-all for moving a mix element ‘forward’ or ‘back’. It’s important to keep a few things in mind when ‘portraying’ depth in a mix, and these can be backed up with observations of acoustics and sound from the real world.

Distance and depth in a mix

When something is close to us, any reverb is much less apparent than the direct sound itself, high frequencies are often stronger as they haven’t been as damped by the air, and transients tend to be more apparent (due to both those mentioned factors). Thinking about these three things suggests settings you can change in your reverb mix, EQ shelves and even compressor settings to provoke a feeling of something being close, and doing the opposite will encourage the feeling of it being further away.

“It doesn’t sound like this track”

Translation: The song hasn’t been mastered yet.

Mixing engineers know that they’re not the last person in the technical chain when working on a song. After each channel has been given its own place in the stereo field and frequency spectrum, and the basic characters, priorities and sense of space have been endowed, it’s not yet the end of the story. Next, a mastering engineer – or AI service like Waves Online Mastering – will buff the final commercial polish on the music and make it ready for specific formats and streaming services.

So when a musician tells an artist that the song being mixed doesn’t yet sound as good as a reference track then there’s a good reason for it: it isn’t finished.

“It still sounds great”

Translation: They might be too used to it.

One thing a mixing engineer has to learn is to take breaks from listening to get perspective on how a project sounds. Listening to the same thing over and over again can be fatiguing, and familiarity can be mistaken for quality.

Protect your perspective

A musician may not have learnt this lesson. So when they’ve been listening to a song over and over and might have lost all perspective, you should encourage them to get it back. This can be done by using a reference track as a palate cleanser, or by simply taking a break. Also, never underestimate the power of parking your production for the day and coming back to it another day with fresh ears. You may be surprised at the glaring issues your ears kept missing the day before.

“Put more reverb on it”

Translation: Think very carefully before putting more reverb on it.

Reverb is one of those impressive effects. To the uninitiated, sounding like you’re flying over early-1990s Seattle is how you wish you could feel every day – but good taste dictates that it may not be a good idea.

Getting the right amount of reverb

Mixing engineers should trust themselves with their choices, and reverb is a hard one to get right in the first place. A track or element without enough reverb can be eerie and dry, which can work in some scenarios but won’t in most. A track or element with too much reverb can sound cheesy, overproduced, or worse – all that reverb competes with other elements in the mix, making the end product worse.

It’s good to have a few different reverbs with varying decay times across effects returns in a mix. With these on tap, you should be able to quickly find a reverb style that both of you feel works or at least a reverb length you can both agree is a suitable amount.

“Wow, make it even wider!”

Translation: Let’s see how far you can push this, regardless of taste.

Another ‘impressive’ studio effect is anything that brings extra width. The boost to the stereo image makes everything sound better, and so it’s tempting for a non-producer to ask to slather it on, making it 10% cake and 90% icing.

But How Much Width is Too Much Width? Excessive width threatens to be a bad thing when a track is played on certain playback systems, and it can cause phase issues with a piece of music as well.

If you think this request is unwise, you can encourage your musician listeners to think about how the resulting mixdown would sound on other playback systems (such as a phone or a car), and remind them that mixing has to balance other factors into a single piece of work. But that doesn’t stop you pushing the width to show how far you could have gone!

“Could you bring out the details?”

Translation: There’s more to this part than you’re realizing.

At the start of this article, we made musicians sound like egomaniacal divas who only want themselves turned up. Here’s the flipside to that: the sensitive, talented musician who has poured love and nuance into their performance, but doesn’t feel like that’s audible within the entire mix.

Make the most form magic moments

Whether it’s a vocalist with subtle inflections or a drummer with their tentative drags on the snare drum, it’s worth listening to requests like these, as they point towards magic moments. As a mixing engineer, if you can make the most of the magic moments, you’ll be making the best of the song you have in front of you.

So how do you make it happen? Bringing out the quiet parts is often a case of dynamic range compression, but upward compression may be a more appropriate choice over a regular compressor for this job.

If you regularly collaborate on mix sessions, check out Waves Stream, a peer-to-peer system enabling anyone in the world to listen into a session via a web browser. If you’re working on a project that’s running close to the deadline and you can’t get the artist into the studio for final mix tweeks, try Waves Stream. Open the Waves Stream Send plugin on a master channel within a session, email the stream link to your artist and follow the simple instructions to get setup from there.

For more information, check out Waves Stream.

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