There's the crux. An experienced engineer will be long past the need for visual aids. Not so much the novice.
I don't see it that way at all, myself. It's not a question of visual aids as it is some stranger somewhere who has never heard the tracks you have in front of you trying to decide what they need and don't need without even listening to them or without even knowing what you want to eventually do with them. It's a silly idea. How could I, when I starting making that chart a few years ago, possibly have any inkling of what the tracks you have in front of you today sound like or even what you really wanted them to sound like? Without those two pieces of information, any advice that could possibly be gleamed from that chart would be worthless, except by random chance.
And whether one is a novice or an experienced pro is, IMHO, irrelevant in two main ways: first, the level of experience of the reader doesn't change the degree of truth, accuracy or relevance of the information in that chart. It will be equally as relevant or irrelevant *to the tracks at hand* regardless of who's doing the reading. The big catch is that the novice tends to blindly believe the chart more, meaning that it can do them far more harm than it can someone with the experience to know that the chart is not where it's at.
Second, regardless of one's experience, you gotta have or develop the ears fisrt. That is the #1 lesson that most don't want to accept. If you ain't got the ears, you might as well find yourself something else to do. Otherwise it's like a blind person trying to get into photography. There's absolutely no point in recording and mixing music if you don't have both the creative ear of a musician and the analytical ear of an engineer. I won't go into the first one, but the second one is something that can be taught and can be learned if one does not have it naturally, and it isn't that hard to learn.
But until one does have the ear, the rest is all completely useless; the arguments about charts, about acoustics, about gear, everything. You might as well just throw it all out if you don't first get the ear. One cannot mix or master without it, novice or not. And if you got the ear, you don't much need the chart.
Funny you should mention this, as it's a point Izhaki makes in his chapter on equalizers that I've been mulling over quite a bit today. It gave me an idea for an A/B demonstration you may be interested in producing: First, mix an arrangement with the instruments tightly compartmentalized into separate bands. Then, mix the same arrangement with more natural overlapping of instruments. It could serve nicely as an example of "do" and "don't".
Hmmm, it's an idea. I'll have to think about that. I'd probably more want to focus on the idea of how the arrangement itself should determine 90% of it, and how the mix and the EQ should be in support of the arrangement, but at the same time, I really don't want to get too heavily into the music composing and arranging theory side of things.
This is where things get tricky when it comes to teaching this stuff; in a very important way, the mixing of the music is really just an extension of the arrangement and the composition of the music, and it's hard to get into one without talking about the other, and the other should be relegated to music school, not recording school. But I'll think about it; I already have the seeds of some ideas starting to sprout.
G.
. No chart in the world can tell you what any given track actually needs; only the track itself can tell you that.
