I'm just picturing Lemmy and the crew recording with "unconditional love". More probably reptile love...
I'm not disagreeing with what you've said, just that was a funny picture that popped in the noggin.
Very new-age-ish, zen balance sort of recording moogie you've got there, MW. A lot of good thought process in a very odd nomenclature. To recap:
1) be in the right mood to make the music you want to make. Beautiful music requires beauty from the performance.
2) tune and drive correctly: Thrash/death metal songs tuned to standard E tuning will not have the impact of a dropped C or A tuning.
3) music is as much about art as science.
4) great music knows where and when to be quiet or to really hit hard.
5) panning and EQ are essential.
6) gain staging and getting good tracking before mixing.
7) ??? Why should you have low quality stuff in your mix? If you're recording someone hitting on trash cans for effect, they don't need to be shut out, just balanced in. Maybe you're talking about proper tracking techniques gone bad?
8) Start with what's important to the mix (usually vocal or solo) and carve everything out that huts that sound. Is frequency unmasking kind of like subtractive EQ?
Some good thoughts, some I don't quite get. Just like most UToob vids.
Thanks and very good recap!
1) be in the right mood to make the music you want to make. Beautiful music requires beauty from the performance.
Exactly! Various moods/internal states will produce various results, but the state of unconditional love is very special because it releases the weight and limits added by less truthful states of being in a great way, because there are no judgments "in the way" of the playing. This you can test out for yourself by playing an instrument. If you play out of unconditional love a session after another, then over time your playing is gradually starting to open up. At first it will sound like a little baby just slamming the keys/drums, half of the tones will be false/out of tune/out of time, half of the tones will be hitting sweet spots. But what happens is that as you gradually over time tune yourself more and more with the instrument by playing in unconditional love, you will start entering musical territories that are really interesting! Inside it feels warm, beautiful and like having a laughing child inside, in the audience you will start noticing people smiling from the joy and release it brings, unconditional love brings a very joyful playfulness that makes you very light inside and it's like you can't help but smile when you experience the music of that and you want to stay in that moment as long as you can, you get addicted by it.
It's great if each musician first practices this art by themselves to optimize their individual playing abilities to max (practicing telling your instrument that you love yourself and others unconditionally), then when the musicians join and play together (practicing telling your instrument that you love others and yourself unconditionally), not only will it cause a resonance effect, but an extremely powerful and beautiful one! Maintaining and building on that state as a band, is key to great music by that band.
Now, this scales of course beyond playing an instrument to mixing, engineering, producing...
A good way of making this shift is to strive towards becoming more real and yourself in every moment and when you play an instrument or work creatively in the studio, to do so as passionately and freely as you possibly can, so that you create without limitations attached, which kind of has more focus about the being in the creative moment rather than focusing on the end result. Of course you can still have an intelligent approach to it, but in order to really move higher and higher it helps to basically through yourself at it with excitement and playfulness, it's great if you can playfully break technical rules and advance in the state of unconditional love, trusting that in this state you access and receive stuff that you otherwise don't do and hence are able to make a bigger musical imprint as a creative artist that feels great and that fuels your passion and creativity. Technical rules can become your worst enemies, the limits they create are there to be broken, but broken in an exciting and beautiful way.
2) tune and drive correctly: Thrash/death metal songs tuned to standard E tuning will not have the impact of a dropped C or A tuning.
Yes, this is a very big topic, the core of it is to abandon the standard 440 Hz tuning, which is out of tune.
3) music is as much about art as science.
Exactly, you could not have said it better!
4) great music knows where and when to be quiet or to really hit hard.
Yes. This is the concept of "Signal-to-background noise", your comment describes the impacts of it on the higher dimensional levels in the multi-dimensional music crystal, as a concept it also scales down to the lower dimensional levels, these are connected.
5) panning and EQ are essential.
Very essential, especially in combination with working to balance individual freq bands of individual sound sources on each speaker and between each speaker. When this is done it helps to remove distracting frequencies while you work, if you for instance work on optimizing the low end of the center, it helps to temporarily mute all side panned instruments and apply a low pass filter on say 1 kHz on the centered panned instruments, so that you can focus on the low frequencies you are working on without having the high frequencies distracting that balancing process.
6) gain staging and getting good tracking before mixing.
Yes also more than gain staging because gain staging is relative to the input and output capacity of your gear, but the actual gain staging process is a very important part of it. It is about efficiently utilizing the signal capacity of high voltage gear to make the input as vital as possible, then efficiently utilizing the signal capacity of high voltage gear to make the output as vital as possible, as well as also feeding high quality power into high quality clocking. The sum of these stages is what is causing the mix to have meat/fullness/vitality/power.
7) ??? Why should you have low quality stuff in your mix? If you're recording someone hitting on trash cans for effect, they don't need to be shut out, just balanced in. Maybe you're talking about proper tracking techniques gone bad?
The point excludes this worst case scenario. The meaning is more that once you have all the great sounding frequencies in there, you still are going to have to lean towards certain particularly well sounding frequencies and make enough room for those in the mix and to further amplify those. In other words it's about making the really great stuff fantastic at the cost of other not as great stuff (which is still great but great with a smaller scope of impact). This can be for instance a combination of really great playing on certain sound sources that contribute a lot to the vibe of the mix as a whole and therefore needs enough vitality/signal added to it.
8) Start with what's important to the mix (usually vocal or solo) and carve everything out that huts that sound. Is frequency unmasking kind of like subtractive EQ?
The most efficient way of learning frequency masking is to read the mixing engineer's handbook, in that book the author explains it in a good way. Frequency unmasking is essentially about understanding what frequencies are occupied by what sound sources and hence what to do with your mixing tools in order to minimize frequency cancellation. A good way of doing is to measure which sound source on what speaker occupies what frequency band by how much, so that you at least have a good understanding about what eats up the signal in the various frequency bands on each speaker. Then you might discover really costly stuff like some electric piano occupying more signal in the low frequency bands than the kick, snare, bass combined on both speakers. It does not have to be that bad, but the frequency unmasking focuses on making you aware of all of this and fixes it.
It is a very big topic and also a very important one. But essentially what it does is to release the available mix signal, so that you can add vitality to the mix and improve the use of the stereo field. It also helps to lighten up frequencies in each frequency band, in other words it helps to brighten and remove mix density which occupies a lot of signal at a low vitality gain due to how it makes mixes clip sooner and hence need to be reduced in signal level. In the frequency unmasking process you work a lot on the individual frequency band level, whether you do it additively or subtractively depends on whether you want some frequency band on sound source A on that speaker to have more vitality directly or whether you indirectly want to give some other sound sources on that frequency band on that speaker/those speakers more vitality by reserving signal in that frequency band by doing a cut on it on sound source A. An example is to remove some of the low end of the vocals that can be fairly loud as a result of the amount of signal you assign to the vocals, which in turn will make it possible to add vitality in those frequency bands to other sound sources such as kick drum and bass guitar. In the frequency unmasking process you also work a lot with taming transients in the various frequency bands on the individual speakers (using frequency band scoped expanding/compression, side chaining works great), so that important sound sources such as kick and snare can cut through well enough and so that you get a good stereo image, it enables you to add more input level across the whole mix in order to boost its vitality and without overloading the compressors/limiters as easily in the gain staging process.
A technique I'm currently discovering, and I'm sure this is common stuff to many out there with more experience than me, is to do more at lower doses at higher volumes. On my mixing journey so far I have somehow got the habit of doing less at higher doses at lower volumes, not that it has not sometimes worked great, but I'm discovering that it seems to work better to do it the other way around. For instance, right now I'm looking into certain very interesting reverbs such as an impulse response of the King's Chamber in the pyramid of Giza, just adding much enough to be noticable at high volume, but not more. Maybe it's a temporary thing, I just wanted to share what I'm currently looking into.
