But initially, when one signs up with a home recording forum, I guess one tends to think more in terms of the amateur recorder, whether rightly or wrongly.
I can kinda-sorta understand that, but it's really more of an unfounded bias and prejudgement than anything else. In fact, the average home recording musician should at least be well enough versed on the subject by pure osmosis to know that "home recording" runs a full gamut of sizes and skills. Any idea otherwise is just wishful thinking against reality on their part. This is very much at the core of why some get pissed off at people like Massive when they are only telling the truth. When the truth conflicts with the questioner's biased desire, they tend to want to reject it.
But this whole "this is only home recording" thing is just a baloney cover anyway, for two reasons. First because the "rules" and the physics and thr truth of recording and music production don't change depending upon the type of user. It doesn't matter whether one is working at Abbey Road or in their basement; the fundamentals remain exactly the same.
Second, and this is a big one, the whole "this is only home recording" dodge evaporates as soon as the home recorder tries putting their track into the middle of their commercial playlist on their mePod, and then come back here to ask how they can make their mix sound like a "pro" or "commercial" mix. As soon as they put the two of them together on the mePod or ask how to make a pro mix, they are no longer asking how to make an amateur home recording, they are now asking how to make a pro recording, but just make a pro recording at home themselves instead of asking a pro to do it for them.
There is only one answer to that; to sound like a pro, you gotta work it like a pro. Period. People get pissed when they hear that because that goes against the fantasy - reinforced by the snake oil sales mopes at GC - that all they need to do is spend a couple hundred bucks and a couple of hours, and computer technology will automatically turn them into recording superstars overnight.
It just doesn't work that way. It's fine if you just want to make a middling "home recording". The the truth is that is NOt what most home recordists really want to do, whether they know it or not. They want to make something that will sound like their commercial CDs and that they can seamlessly stick into a commercial playlist. They want to make pro recordings. That takes time, dedication and technique. Even more so, it takes "the ear". Which brings us to:
When a pro or expert makes a statement like "do what the mix/music tells you",
they know what they mean. But to someone like me, it could seem like almost human/magical properties are being ascribed to the music. The very fact that you get remixes kind of indicates that the engineer is in fact the one that crafts the recorded music into something because there could be a number of ways of mixing a piece of finished music. Which, if the above quote is true and taken literally, could mean that the "mix/music" could be 'telling' you all kinds of different things...
Maybe we all need to make more of an effort to understand where each other may be coming from.
It would be easy for me to say that if one needs to ask that question, they are not yet ready to start recording/mixing/mastering, because one who is actually prepared to do those things intrinsically understands what is meant by "the music will tell you".
But in the interest of talking the same language - and not pissing off some newbs - let me try explaining a bit further.
I'll take mixing and producing, because that's what I mainline, but it really applies to tracking and mastering as well in their own ways. Mixing is at its best a *collaboration* between the engineer and the material. Each supplies it's own personality and each provides it's own influences, but neither one is the master of the relationship.
Any given guitar track (just for one example) is going to have certain characteristics to it because if the type of guitar used, with it's own timbre and key formants, because of the person playing it with their own particular style and emotion, and because of the music composition itself. There is very little that the mixing engineer can do to change most of those things, and in the best mixes, he shouldn't even try that much. He can play a bit with the arrangement by choosing when to use certain passages and how loud to make them, but he should not try to use the rest of his processing power like EQ and compression to make those personality traits of that guitar track different. That's like trying to take the spots off a leopard.
Instead, the mix engineer needs to recognize those properties for what they are, and instead of trying to make them change into something entirely different, try and make them *work* by making the best out of what's there.
If you have a lemon, make lemonade, but don't try to change it into a watermelon. If you have a Guild, don't try to make it a Martin, but rather make the Guild work as a Guild to make the mix sound good. Don't try to make the Guild sound like a non-Guild, but rather make it the best-sounding guild you can in terms of what sound right for the mix.
This becomes the general principle that you don't try to make a mix sound different, you try to make it sound better. There is a difference between the two. This is what is often meant by "the music will tell you". Really what that means is you have to have the ear to tell what is and is not possible with the material you have to work with.
This is where the material is the boss. But the engineer is equally the boss. Here's how. What a rough mix tells me and what it tells you may not be exactly the same thing. While audio engineering (home or not) is based upon and built upon a solid, immovable foundation of science, it is, after all, an artistic endeavor. It's not a case of a set of tracks that want to sound exactly like "X", and the closer an engineer gets to X, the better they are. There is no one specific obligatory destination of a give mix. There is a degree of artistic impression to producing and mixing. It still has to be within the constraints of what the mix will allow, but within those constraints, there is a lot of room for artistic interpretation. It's entirely possible - and it happens often - for an engineer to make two different mixes of one set of tracks that have quite different "feels" to them or different focii to them, or to give the same ingredients to two different engineers and wind up with two different mixes that are equally good in their own ways. This is where the producer/engineer is the boss.
But no matter how you slice it, you have to have "the ear" if you want to her what the music is telling you. This means two things at once, IMHO. It means having the analytical listening skills to hear what's needed and what works and doesn't work on a technical level (e.g. knowing when the 4k area is truly too harsh or why the piano doesn't get along with the guitar, etc.), and what is "fixable" and what isn't. It also means having the artistic listening skills to get what the mood of the song wants to be, where the hooks are and how to use them, recognizing the arrangement and how to get the most out of it, etc.
This is why folks like Massive and me and a hundred others here get so exasperated by those who think that making music is just a matter of following the right recipe by boosting X, cutting Y, or using plan Z. because that is so NOT how this works, even for the home recorder. You have to work with the material you have, listen to what it says to you, imagine what you want to make out of it that it will allow, and then do what is specifically needed to do to get from here to there.
Without that basic understanding and those basic listening skillz, home recording will be little more than an exercise in frustration and disappointment. If that truth pisses anybody off, that's a problem with their reaction, not with the truth itself or with those who have to deliver it.
G.
