Why Are the Big Boys Better Than Us?

Recording, Mixing and Producing
#66

I think it even goes beyond stamina. I think there is a lot to be said for “striking while the iron is hot”…doing things in a timely manner.

for instance I started the NTM song for this month right at the beginning of the month and I worked on it for a few days and made good solid progress getting all the way thru EQing and compressing the vocals. So its like 90% done I guess.

but then I stopped to do the 5/5 songwriting challenge etc. And now I havent even looked at the NTM song in about a week and TBH I dont really care lol.

Its like, once u sort of break the flow then its very hard to pick back up in the middle. Im looking at some of the moves I made and dont even remember doing them etc

Also explains why most of the song i have actually more or less “finished” have been done in 1 or 2 days. I hate leftovers and backtracking to try to pick up the vibe again

yeah im a basket case but i cant be the only one lol

How in the world Def Leppard could ever take a year or two to do an album is beyond me

#67

There’s something to be said for this at the top levels. Just as in sports, mathematics, and politics, that level just weeds out people who can’t cut it. Not for lack of effort or resources, but because they just aren’t good enough.

I’m of the opinion (as of now) that this is partly luck. I’m not a big luck-of-the-draw person, and I believe talent and work ethic increase chance…but it seems there are some incredibly talented engineers that get overlooked for simply being in the wrong geographic area of the world or being limited by overall economic status of their countries.

I can’t speak for producers, but for mix engineers this is partly true. The other part to this is that the condition the tracks are in by the time they actually reach the main mix engineer are already much further along than most people realize. There are some extremely qualified and highly trained assistants working with these big name guys that know exactly how to prep, format, and fold tracks before they get anywhere near your main guy’s console.

Please don’t take this the wrong way: I’ve found there’s a bit of lapse on some forums when it comes to understanding of the process of sending a mix to an A list mix guy. I think the responsibility of the producer and the mix engineer assistants is often overlooked when assessing the speed at which the some mix guys are able to ‘get to the good stuff’.

Since working for these Nashville companies, I’ve learned a lot in the last few months about parking faders, positioning samples, and placing surgical EQ cuts in places from the get-go to minimize the number of corrective moves down the road. And I’ve gotten a LOT better at this. I also started playing with a trick I learned from JJP where you go through and build a template for a specific artist by doing fast balancing mixes (about an hour or two piece) and mix the entire record a couple times over in cycles because you continuously learn new things about the collective record through mixing multiple passes of all the songs.

All kinds of shit going down with politics, budgets, producers, creative direction, musicians checking in/out of rehab, hiccups in the production schedule…

hey…read the Daily Adventures of Mixerman…you’ll see how it takes 2 years to finish a record!!

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#68

yeah, forget the assistants, CLA or some other top mixer isnt even going to see tracks unless they are coming from a top recording engineer and producer. And a lot of the stuff he does see was tracked with compression etc coming in so a lot of the work is already done.

if you take a pro like CLA or JJP, one day they are producing but not mixing and the next day they are mixing something that someone else produced. The point being they are either SENDING OFF pro produced stuff to a fellow pro mix engineer, or they are RECEIVING pro produced stuff from a fellow producer. Everyone involved is setup to succeed.

of course all the top guys had to slog their way TO the top by going thru the thousands of mixes they did under crappy conditions lol

#69

That’s not necessarily true. It is possible to contract them for mix work as an independent artist.

That’s not my understanding of either of them. You may want to look into this some more.

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#70

well obviously I am assuming and using common sense as opposed to acting like I know more than I do. But I see these guys names on many albums as producer while some other top guy is mixing it and vice versa.

for instance the album ‘human’ by Three Days Grace shows Gavin Brown as producer and CLA as mixer. looking at credits it seems somewhat rare to see the same top guy as producer and mixer

CLA mixed Daughtry, Break the Spell…but Howard Benson produced it

look at CLAs last 50 credits. Most say “mixing” and only a few also say “producer”

#71

to take it even further. Im pretty sure that if we research it, CLA has mixed a ton of stuff that Howard Benson produced. So this goes even deeper than 1 pro handing off to some other random pro. this is on pro handing off to a buddy pro on a regular basis so they know each others methods very well.

thats the concept of one hand shaking the other and for us lone wolf guys that would translate to us having standardized workflows and presets etc for moves we KNOW we will make 98% of the time

of course I am quite a ways from that lol

#72

There ya go. He’s pretty outspoken about how he wanted to be the producer because he wanted to be the important guy everybody worked with. Then he changed gears and went into mixing because of the chance to work with a wider variety of groups, move through projects at a faster pace, and because he found the redundancy of mashing the recording button frickin punishing.

I’ve never heard him talk about this publicly but he told me he’s pretty adamant about never sharing work or doing collaborate stuff with anyone. Even his friends. And former mentors. And that beating them at the business game is far more important to him than sustaining any kind of real relationship with people. I also found it amusing that he refers to his staff as dickhead #1, dickhead #2, and dickhead #3 etc… But I guess that goes with the game when he walks into the room and goes “So…who in here wants to be me???” lol.

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#73

yeah he definitely seems to position himself as some kind of tuff guy…old school leftover 70s type. Good to have a few of them around I guess. Then u look at a guy like Cameron Webb who is as talented but seemingly without the blatant arrogance

#74

Another thing is that the tracking engineer doesn’t decide who the project gets handed off to. This is typically the producers call. Unless you have a contract arrangement like mine where I have the producers working in-house to guarantee that the mix stays in my facility when possible.

#75

I didn’t realize how far he took this until I sat down in a room with him myself. I wrote extensively about this back on RR, and I have to say it was a little bit depressing. It was a little bit beyond what I’m willing to do even to get where he is. The good news is that for every highly successful fucked-in-the-head ass hole like Martha Stewart or piece of shit person like Steve Jobs, there are plenty of other billionaires and music industry superstars who didn’t get where they are by leaving a trail of dead bodies on their way to the top.

Disclaimer: I really do not know CLA personally. I can only base my experience on a couple interactions with him. He may be an amazing super awesome guy who was just in a real bad mood because he’d been screwed over at the airport on his way back to the studio. Who knows. I can’t judge him…I won’t judge him.

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#76

he comes across how he comes across though lol

#77

They’re just better at burying the bodies.

#78

I think it’s interesting coming back to this question 3 and a half years later with a career change and lot of new life experiences.

Over the last 3 years, I’ve seen some experienced but still non-full time professional mixers turn out some (what in my opinion) is pretty incredible mix and production work.

Some of my conclusions were heavily influenced by discourse at the six-figure home studio facebook group. I started to understand that the ability to push out mixes quickly and consistently was what sustains a mix engineer financially, while their status or path to becoming a ‘big boy’ is expedited by their track record. The higher quality, and the higher the volume (as in quantity) of their product, the greater percentage chance they have of getting that first ‘hit’ on the record books which seems to springboard a career into a higher and higher echelon of clientele IF you can continue to build on that first hit.

I used to think this had a LOT more to do tools and raw talent than I do now. I’ve really changed my opinion on that. I still believe that skill level is a factor, and that tools play a roll in productive workflow, but I looking back on this 3 years later, I think they’re a far less critical part of the puzzle than I used to believe.

So to anyone here who’s interested in pick this back up, or @AJ113 - (If you’re still around these days)… looking back on this from a different angle, it may be worthwhile to also ask ‘why are the big boys big in the first place’? and then ‘how does their bigness enable them to work differently than us’?

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#79

I believe that is the reason that they are the BIG boys, too. I also believe that is the best “formula” for success in most, if not all music endeavors and also many other career paths. If I was to guess which of the two is more important (Quality VS Quantity), I would say “quantity”. Imagine writing one or two great songs…There’s so much competition out there that it is highly likely those songs will be lost amongst all the other good songs and the mountain of mediocrity. Now imagine you’ve written 400 good but not great songs. I would bet that 1 of the 400 songs would gain traction before either of the two great songs. The reason I believe that is because there is a fair bit of luck involved in music success and taking 2 swings at success verses 400 swings is a dramatic difference and even two great songs can get buried and lost in a crowd of 400 good songs…Quality is also completely subjective but quantity is objective.

People who are successful in music and elsewhere are not necessarily the most talented or skilled. I’m absolutely certain everyone on this forum has seen and heard countless “musicians”, “artists” and “performers” that are famous and successful but are shockingly devoid of musical skills or talent. They likely have one or a few of these qualities though ;

  1. They have a very strong work ethic and drive. They don’t hesitate to act. They just do it

  2. They’ve ridden someone else’s coattails to get to where they are. This still requires hanging in there and sticking with it. It requires not abandoning ship before being awarded with success.

  3. Good fortune, good luck. Someone has to hit the jackpot. Sometimes it’s just being at the right place, at the right time. If you’re driven and your work ethic is excellent (see #1) and/ or you follow #2 your chances of “Luck” happening improve greatly.

I consider a strong work ethic and drive to be a skill …or a talent. That is a skill/ talent that can bring much more success than being musically skilled or talented. The world is filled with very talented musicians who can’t find any notoriety or success, while some of the most successful musicians/artists are verging on musical incompetence. Musicians who want success have to think like salesmen. They need to be business minded, or they need to have someone on their team that has that skill. Consistency and volume (output) with everything that is encompassed within the trade/ industry that you desire to be a success in. That means, if you’re an Indie musician, you have to regularly communicate with your fanbase, you have to regularly release music, you have to regularly and consistently “show up” if you want any decent degree of success. So to make a long story a bit shorter, I think you got it right…

#1. Consistency,
#2. Volume
and
#3. the best quality that you can attain, while pushing #1 and #2

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#80

There’s a big emphasis on consistency and expediency in the restaurant and food services business. And it seems to me like there’s a lot of similarities.

Here’s what I understand now that I refused to accept 3 years ago: After a lot of practice, a guy with a smoker in his back yard is capable of grilling a slab of ribs that the general public couldn’t tell apart from a professional BBQ chef. He won’t be able to reproduce that consistently and scale it to the volume of a commercial kitchen, but he IS capable of getting lucky and landing a competitive result once in a while.

So yeah, I agree. I do believe that a narrow chunk of the amateur and semi-pro home studio population are capable of achieving the quality but not at the same…

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#81

I’ve come to the conclusion that speed is important. If you can get a mix to an acceptable level in a short space of time then you have more ‘headroom’ to do all the tiny tweaks that the big boys do.

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#82

Over at the Audio Mix Club site, Rob, the guy who runs it is an excellent mixer who really promotes this idea. He really pushes the idea of “template mixing” to facilitate exactly the kind of “headroom” you suggested above. He’s a bit of a Billy Decker disciple, and has spent some time with Billy personally.

Billy currently has a book out that I have, called “Template Mixing and Mastering” in which he breaks down is approach to “speed mixing”.

While I don’t personally have any ambitions to compete in the world of “The Big Boys” (at least, not in terms of seeking to earn an income and achieve status in that world), I think this concept has some merit, in the sense that, if you can speed up your workflow in getting to the creative part of mixing as quickly as possible, you stay fresh, and you don’t burn out - physically, emotionally and creatively.

Now, I’m not a fast mixer by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve gotten faster over the years… so I thought I would adapt this template idea to my own way of working, and I built a template as a starting point for my mixes. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a great idea, and it really does assist in getting to the magic static balance point, where all the processing is done, and you’re ready to start really mixing: ie: you’re ready to “do all the tiny tweaks that the big boys do”.

Actually the first mix ( for someone else) that I did starting out with a template like this was this mix that I did last month at AMC. It worked out pretty well, I thought.

That said, I don’t think so called “speed mixing” or “template mixing” is something I’d recommend to beginning mixers. Guys like Billy and Rob probably put 20 years in before they started doing it that way. I believe you really have to develop and explore your own taste, sense of balance, and just basic technical acuity before you can get to the point where you’re ready to turn it all into a “workflow”.

I see some who are 6 months into mixing spruiking these concepts, when it is clear from their mixes that they haven’t put enough time in and made enough mistakes to even get to the point where they know what a good static mix sounds like. That’s kind of like trying to run before you can even crawl IMO.

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#83

And they will also be influenced by the detractors of the method, who often level the accusation of “cookie cutting”. Personally I don’t care what label people want to put on it. The only thing that matters is the quality of the noise coming out of the speakers.

FYI Andrew I don’t use templates, but I do use a shedload of preset chains, samples and even preset levels - I guess the principle amounts to the same thing more or less.

Edit: By ‘preset’ I mean that they are my own saved data, not stock presets.

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#84

Aha yep, that is another great approach, and essentially the same thing in a lot of ways.

About the only difference is that the template approach keeps all the routing intact, which can be expedient when you use parallel processes such and auxiliary channels.

Rob Morgan (of AMC) takes it to the extreme. He has even built specialised macros for multiple step editing/cleanup functions that need to be done on each mix, as well as a routing system of multiple output busses that allows him to render multiple versions of a mix (Mastered, Unmastered, Main Instrument Stems etc) in one step.

My brain doesn’t work that way, but I can certainly hear evidence of its advantages in the quality of the mixes he turns out.

Amen to that. Whatever works best!

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#85

Some valid points.

My main theory is that the big boys are the big boys because they didn’t give up!

I know many engineers on here and other forums that definitely have the ear and talent to make it as a big boy.

But have they taken that path in their life?
Did they (like many of the big boys) begin by helping out for free in studios and learning the craft in the early hours.

Do they have other priorities like family, mortgage, debts , job etc.

If so they can’t possibly commit 100% to challenge the big boys.
And like you say, it takes a lot of good luck too!

Right place right time and all that

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