How I mix music #5_ Bass & Drums

Stevie Wonder sitting at his Honer D-6 Clavinet says to his drummer, Ollie Brown …” Ollie, give me boom- bap, boom boom-bap, boom, bap, boom boom-bap …you know (laughs).
 With his D-6 running through a wha-wha pedal Steve turned his whole body into a bass part. It was amazing. This was the beginning of Chaka Khan and Rufus’s ‘Tell me Something Good’.

Bass and drums are the foundation of most modern music. When mixed into a composition they will not always but probably occupy two thirds of your meter range. They produce the most energy among the other instruments they share a limited amount of space with.

Mixing music is just another facet of a recording engineer’s baseline job …project management. Producers manage artist, songs, studio time, budget, etc. Engineers play a huge role in managing the project by keeping the projects production flow at the maximum potential of operational abilities for the studio and her related staff.

There is an old saying professing an engineer’s greatest challenge in mixing music, “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit”. You can and should attempt to use all the tools at your disposal to make your salad taste as well as you can …but:

If you are tasked with mixing bass and drums into a song with powerful guitars, the Mormon Tabernacle choir, a Quincy Jones string section playing charts with the Phoenix Horns all backing up Janis Joplin belting out a vocal performance over a 9' Grand Piano …something is going to get really small, real fast …it’s going to be bass and drums.
Comedian Geroge Carlin once said:
 "You can't have everything cause ... where'd ya put it?"
Again ... the medium of sound is air. Take all the air out of an aural presentation and the first thing that suffers is tonal clarity.
Next up – Blending Drums.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Table of Contents

Image
It's All in the Talkback For Tom Cody ...and Bruiser ~Welcome to the Show~ Lessons learned from life on the other side of the glass. 1)      The 4 Ups 2)      Cool Plug ins: How do you know? 3)      Cool Plug ins: Its Level 4)      Hang ~Around the Campfire @ The Old School Music House~   A combined 200 years of audio engineering experience sitting around a campfire. 1)      Getting there   2)      Digital / Analog Warriors   3)      How do you know? Call Chips   4)      People knowledge. A lost treasure?   5)      Romantics vs Classics   6)      How did we learn? Under fire     7)      I'm out      ~The Show~ 50 Years of How I Mix Music 00)      3 Screens 01)      Whadda ya need?   02)      Color   03)      The Meat   04)      Raising Faders   05)      Bass & Drums 06)      Blending Drums 07)      Drums ...You or me?   08)      Drums ...How big is your window?   09)      Snare drum ...Loudness   10)      Mixing Overheads   11)      Mixing Bass   12)      Whaaat?? 1-5 summ
Read more

Hang

Image
 Hang: With the push of a button or the swiping of a finger across a screen ...poof, an audience is entertained. Instantly they are rewarded with the content of their choosing. Seldom if ever does the audience member consider the structural events that have taken place to present their chosen content to them. Be it news, movies or music, the technical aspect of providing media content to a broad market is managed by people. People with feelings and ambitions, not necessarily congruent with one another, work together to deliver the content. Emotion generally weighs heavily over pragmatism when it comes to entertainment. That formula holds true for any human involved with the production of media. The percentages of emotion-over-pragmatism vary with the people involved in its production. News broadcasts are at the low end of the emotion-over scale where music capture is at its highest. Either way, quilts hanging on a garage wall or black walnut walls with motor driven drapes to “tun
Read more

You don't see this often ...

Image
We usually speak of the things we love weighted towards its positive aspect, the ones that attract us. The recording studio business has a lot of positive aspects. Recording Studios are usually dimly lit, vibe filled, creative environments open to social practices you’d never see in any business catering to the general public. Here is my last blog for you who have followed me (Thank you by the way). In analog you have positive and negative energy pulses. In digital you have ones and zeros. Basically, you cannot have one without the other. Think about it …can you have an up without a down, a right without a left, a good without a bad a happy without a sad. The answer is obviously no. To restate …you can’t have one without the other. Here is “the other”: Artistic people are generally “a little different” from polite society. They will most likely present as being sensitive, introverted and reserved. Some come across as pretentious all-knowing people who are some gifts to all m
Read more