That quote from Saint-Exupéry has, for years, been the guiding principle in my music and audio production work. I strongly believe that in most cases, less truly is more. To be clear, other than recording some occasional overdubs, I no longer do recording sessions. Instead, I work with audio that has already been recorded, and prepare it for distribution through Audio Repair and Noise Reduction, Sweetening, Mixing, and Mastering. If that sounds like something your music needs, please contact me. For people not familiar with these aspects of the music and audio production process, I encourage you to read on as I describe them below and provide some recorded examples to demonstrate the outcome.
In the 1980s, I was spending a lot of time in recording studios producing commercial music and realized that while I had the knowledge and skill for the musical aspects of that work, I struggled to describe my wishes to the recording engineers in their terminology. Consequently, I enrolled in an audio engineering class to learn the concepts and vocabulary of audio production so that I could better express myself during recording sessions. Along the way, I fell in love with the process and began hanging out in studios in my spare time to learn everything I could. By the time the personal computer revolutionized the world of audio recording, I had already spent years honing my listening and recording skills working with analog tape where there is no undo button—you really need to know what you are doing before you put something on tape. That knowledge enabled me to take full advantage of the nearly unlimited possibilities that digital audio production offered, and while I continued to work in studios, I began sharing that knowledge by teaching music recording and production techniques in major music schools like the University of Southern California's renowned Thornton School of Music.
Audio Repair and Noise Reduction
After receiving a set of recorded tracks, the first thing I do is listen to each track individually for any sort of extraneous noises or mistakes. Good musicians and recording engineers will typically fix any obvious noises, mistakes, or wrong notes by re-recording the track before sending the session files, but occasionally, one sneaks through. When that happens, they can usually be repaired with judicious editing and/or discreet application of pitch correction.
Although things like mistakes and wrong notes are pretty rare on the recordings I receive, it is not uncommon to find some noise on one or more of the tracks. Noise tends to be either momentary or continuous. Momentary noises are things like mouth pops and clicks, a cough or loud breath, a chair squeak, a truck passing by outside, etc. Again, most engineers will catch these kinds of noises and re-record the track before sending the session files. When I do encounter them, they are usually singular, or occasional events that can typically be removed or dramatically reduced with precision audio editing. Continuous noise, on the other hand, is much more difficult to control since it usually lasts through large portions of a track, if not the entire track. These types of noises are things like an electrical hum, air conditioner noise, amplifier noise, microphone bleed (when a microphone picks up sound from other sources than the one it is focused on), and tape hiss from older analog recordings. Using a suite of powerful audio editing tools, I am able to isolate the specific frequencies at which the noise occurs and remove or reduce as much of that as possible without affecting the musical quality of the track.
Removing the noise from a track serves several purposes. Eliminating momentary noise removes distractions that draw the listener’s attention away from the musical content. Removing continuous noise allows me to produce cleaner recordings. Audio mixing is a summative process that adds the signals of multiple audio tracks together. If the tracks also contain continuous noise, you end up summing all the noise as well, thus raising its overall level in the mix. By removing individual track noise, the final mix becomes clearer and better focused on the musical content. Removing noise at the track level also allows me to apply creative sweetening tools to enhance the sound on the individual tracks without enhancing the noise.
Listen to examples
Sweetening
While audio repair and noise reduction are designed to remove unwanted sounds from individual tracks, sweetening is the process of enhancing and improving the wanted sounds on a track. There are two ways I typically sweeten a recorded track. Most commonly I use signal-processing tools like frequency filters, reverb, chorus, delay, etc. to make the recorded track sound richer, Secondly, I sometimes record an overdub track with a similar sounding instrument to thicken, or fatten, the original track. Even when I record an overdub, I usually apply some signal processing to the original track, and to the overdub track as well. Performing audio repair, noise reduction, and sweetening at the individual track level allows me to ensure that each track sounds its very best before I begin combining them in the mixing stage.
Listen to examples
Mixing
Once I have removed undesirable noise and sweetened the individual tracks, I proceed to the mixing stage. Most recording engineers strive to capture the audio signal of each instrument or voice at as high a volume level as possible on its individual track. Doing so improves the signal-to-noise ratio of a track, thus reducing, or even eliminating, much of the continuous noise issue described above. They also record each track so that the sound is centered between the main left and right speakers when played back. What that means is, when all the tracks are played together, the individual tracks are all equally loud with no difference between foreground, middleground, and background tracks, and they are all centered in the stereophonic- or surround-sound field.
At its most basic, mixing is the process of adjusting the loudness of the individual tracks so that their levels are appropriately balanced, as well as setting the stereophonic- or surround-sound pan (audio engineer shorthand for panoramic) positions of the individual tracks so that they are distributed across the listening environment. Once those levels and pan positions have been set, the tracks are mixed down, or combined into a single stereophonic- or surround-sound audio track. In reality, the mixdown process is much more complicated since loudness and listening-environment position are used to focus the listener's attention on certain aspects of a song, and that focus frequently changes throughout the song. Consequently, those controls need to be constantly adjusted to make the overall mix more dynamic.
Listen to examples
Mastering
Many people assume that once a recording project is mixed, the project is finished. WRONG!!! Mastering is the magic dust, the final stage that takes a well-mixed set of tracks and turns it into a polished professional recording ready for broadcast and distribution on physical media and streaming services.
Mastering typically consists of two distinct phases. First, I use a set of extremely sophisticated filters and audio compressors to adjust the overall frequency spectrum and loudness levels of the song to match the spectra and levels expected for the song's particular musical genre. This is a delicate and time-consuming process that readies your recording to sonically stand shoulder to shoulder with other songs in the same genre. In the case of larger projects, such as an album, I also make sure there is a consistent sonic quality from song to song so the album sounds like a cohesive unit.
One thing people notice right away after mastering is that the song not only sounds clearer, it often sounds louder than the mixed version. In reality, both the mixed and mastered versions will have the same, or similar, maximum output level. It's just that the mastered version usually narrows the dynamic range (the difference between the softest and loudest parts of the song), pushing the song's quieter content up to a louder level. That tends to make the overall song seem louder than before. Depending on the genre and the style of music I'm mastering, that difference in apparent loudness can range from nearly imperceptible to really obvious.
In the second phase of mastering, I ensure that the final recording meets the technical standards for the various ways in which it will be distributed. Radio, television, film, compact disc manufacturing, and the various streaming services frequently have slightly different needs and technical specifications for the recordings they use. I will produce a final recording—sometimes several versions of the final recording—to meet those specifications.
A special note of thanks to the band Negative for allowing me to use excerpts from their recording of Perfect Day to demonstrate these audio production techniques. Please check out the complete recording and video of Perfect Day on YouTube.
All the examples below are copyrighted by Negative and used with permission.
- KICK DRUM BEFORE NOISE (MIC BLEED) REDUCTION
- KICK DRUM AFTER NOISE (MIC BLEED) REDUCTION
- SINGLE GUITAR TRACK BEFORE SWEETENING
- SINGLE GUITAR TRACK AFTER SWEETENING
- ALL TRACKS BEFORE MIXING
- ALL TRACKS AFTER MIXING
- ALL TRACKS AFTER MASTERING
