mixing techniques and retaining the purity of raw music

pcstudios

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I didn't really know where to post this, but here seems ok, because it involves mixing techniques.

I've been offered to work along side someone who works with commercial audio productions, like lingos and short 15s clips. It sounded good at first. But my passion is mixing acoustic music. Acoustic music has a purity and free from auto tune and free from fixing small timing errors here and there - it is what it is. That's part of the beauty of folk and acoustic, it flows freely and purely without many artificial fixes, retaining the integrity of the artists. The commercial world of advertisements have to be perfect in pitch, perfect in timing, or it gets thrown out. It's so artificial. So I'm wondering if I'm dumb to pass this up. It could bring in some dough from royalties, but it would feel fake to me. I'm a musician first, and I don't want to mix things to sound like a automatic machine.

Any thoughts on this?
 
Ha! welcome to the world of commercial music. The needs and demands of producing short cues, jingles, stabs and promo clips will be extremely different to your view off the recording world. Having done this (and still doing with Covid in mind), you have to stop the quest for 'art', and go with the business needs. You are absolutely spot on with the perfection criteria mentioned. You also forgot time itself - everything needs doing instantly. The phone rings. Can you do this, this and this? You say yes, they counter with "within the hour?" If you say yes, you get paid. I seriously doubt you will get royalties, most of my stuff on these deals is buy-out. No credit, no royalties. It's just too complicated to do PRS/PPL (or the US equivalent) for a composition lasting ten seconds, with mono title, and after a few days, forgotten.

If live acoustic music without processing is your thing - then you can record the pap if you isolate yourself. So This morning I'm working on a classical style piece for a video, and a sting that goes duh-duh-duh-bang! I can get my head around this. However, I am not a sonic purist in any sense, so your artistic sentences are simply not me. I can't subscribe to the 'reality' approach. A recent project with an trained and experience operatic singer was becoming very difficult - so many takes, none were in her view perfect. I introduced her to comping, and after the expected initial sneer, she spent ages listening to each take with me, and we chopped them up and colour coded each one - perfect green through to unacceptable red. Once we had green for the entire piece of Brahms, we then revisited the greens and changed them to shades of green and ended up with the perfect recording. I then introduced her to pitch correction and we tidied up the few pitch errors. I explained only she and I knew, and that was enough. She's so pleased with the end product that is NOT as pure and untweaked as people believe.

It works for me.
 
I hear you. I know there are definitely times you need to get the pitch correction out and slide clips left and right to be on time. My genre is bluegrass mostly, and it’s definitely known for its purity. The only bluegrass band I hear that is dead on for timing and pitch is Alison Krauss and Union Station. And they’re actually good enough to be on time and pitch without the processing. But you listen to the other artists - Tony Rice, Blue Highway, Del McCoury, Chris Jones - and the timing breathes, and the singing is supposed to be off a little. That’s the way Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs played it too. People like to hear it that way. So, my genre of bluegrass definitely is an exception.

So I’m not discouraging you because any other type of music needs those fixes. There’s a good reason why nobody makes money in bluegrass!! Lol
 
Just change your name when you do the commercial stuff.
On the other hand, you might get a better name/reputation when people see that you're versatile enough to handle all aspects of the recording world. Even jingles have their place.

So I'm wondering if I'm dumb to pass this up
I wouldn't call you dumb. Why would you be considered dumb for making a decision and thinking it through. That's smart.
But consider that you have skills that are applicable to both worlds. And you may learn to appreciate both worlds or......love and appreciate the bluegrass even more having been constantly soiled by the other.
 
I've learned more from taking those more unusual jobs, than I ever have doing my first loves. My 6 month stint in commercial radio taught me where you can cut corners, but more important where you can't! The need for mega accurate timing really sticks in your head. You can read a bot of script and know it's too short or too long without having to actually record it. Taking a stemmed chopped up sequence and being able to pull out the sections, cut them up and have it sound smooth is a great technique to learn, especially when the thing MUST top out at 20 seconds on the button. My time in wildlife audio was brief too, but again, amazingly useful. Although classically trained when I was a kid, I left it all behind and then suddenly found myself back involved in it and all those Italian terms suddenly popped back so you can converse with proper musicians. I've flipped around between sound, lights and video for 40 years now, and it's great when the phone rings to be able to say yes, then ask what the job is!

I think my down fall is that I'm not passionate about anything, and actively dislike quite a lot. Bluegrass is pretty unknown to me here in the UK. I recognise it, but Alison Krauss was the only name I recognised. If somebody asked me to do a recording, I'd jump at it.
 
Take the work.

You will gain knowledge and experience that will be immensely broadening. You are not obliged to use anything that they do in stuff that you may do, but having the knowledge and ability to do so may come in handy. While you may want to take the purist approach to recording and mixing, your customers may not.
 
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