Why is it that certain combination of sounds that make sense on a music level never seem to blend together while mixing? How do you get better at adjusting and modifying a sound so it fits in with the other ?
Ok, so that was cruel but I was just choking {literally ~ I swallowed a capsule that was too large}.
Every single combination of voice, instrument and sound that exists in recording once did not exist. That may sound like a statement from Captain Obvious but there's a method to the madness.
I read an interesting book on George Harrison a while back and the writer Simon Leng made a really interesting point about the Beatles when they first went into EMI studios to make records. They'd been playing together for 5~6 years and had written lots of songs. But their songs were for live consumption and they never really heard themselves
as recording artists apart from one crappy thing they did in a booth and as backing musicians for Tony Sheridan in Germany on a few songs. But when they got into the studio after 1962, they found that their songwriting and playing skills went to a whole different level because the demands were now different. This was stuff that had to bear repeated listenings forever and a day and that's why George Martin was so important to the development of them as a band and to three of them as songwriters.
About 5 years ago, I read Richie Unterberger's books "Turn turn turn" and "Eight miles high" which are a 2 volume work on folk rock and how pretty much most of the music of the mid 60s on came out of this. Both books are fascinating and are packed to the gills with wonderful stories and info. But something struck me during the reading of them. In parts there's an underlying criticism of the notion of "just putting bass and drums to acoustic folk tunes" {that's how Simon & Garfunkel's first hit came about ~ they didn't even know. They'd just made an acoustic guitar song} but what struck me was that a new sound was being created and as more and more new kinds of instruments came into rock and pop {and indeed soul, jazz and folk}, a way had to be found to accomodate them within this new context they were being put into. There was no template. Engineers just experimented with mixing until "it sounded/felt right". Then that became the accepted sound.
It's interesting, for example, listening to instances of the sitar on rock records. Sometimes it sounds just right, other times it sounds out of place, like it was just grafted on. Even with the electric guitar, as various guitarists experimented with recording lots of guitar tracks, things got to sound a certain way and very rarely did prominent guitarist continue to just record one guitar on a song. And on live albums alot of guitarists who sound awesome on studio records just sound incredibly thin.
Certain instruments became associated with certain genres but in every instance, engineers and producers experimented with the instruments and/or voices recorded and these made up the sounds we know today.
But there's more to it than just having X and Y instrument. Much of the time, these sounds that became permanent did so by accident. There's tons of instances of artists being really disappointed when they heard the mixes of their records.
And that's where you come in. There's alot of searching, trying this and that and messing about with various tools as you go in search of what you consider to be the right sound. You may well end up with something that you really like but which wasn't exactly what you were searching for initially.
