I’m really digging Father John Misty’s new album at the moment – particularly a song called (Everything But) Her Love. The album itself (called Chloe and The Next 20th Century) is what you could label a ‘throwback’ or a ‘nostalgic sounding’ piece, reminiscent of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western emulsified with The Beatles’ Revolver. (Everything But) Her Love caught me off guard – one of those moments after two or three listens through when everything about the song made sense. The song came alive, it was breathing, dancing in fact. There is a wonderful sense of familiarity to the song, you can be taken on the same journey, listen after listen, and discover something new every time. The songwriting is Impeccable. The arrangement is virtuosic. The mix is flawless…but what does that mean? If it’s a good song to start with, what difference does the mix make, right? 

Let’s go on a bit of a journey together. The craft of mixing, like anything, takes years if not decades to be competent and a lifetime to master. Mixing is such a fascinating part of sound production though. It’s all about nuance, balance, energy and to some degree, a sixth sense. With this article I want to go back and look at a bit of mixing history through the decades. I must say that this is brief, dive deep and find your own rabbit hole to dive down – this sort of stuff is bottomless.  Without going deep into the history of actually recording sound, i.e phonograph, I’ll mainly be focusing on the periods of magnetic recording (tape) and digital recording.
If you’ve ever seen pictures of a studio you’ll have seen a mixing console – a big table with hundreds of knobs and buttons, an engineering masterpiece really! Early recording consoles had a very limited number of channels – microphones were also used sparingly. The musicians being recorded knew how to play with a sense of balance and had the ability to ‘mix’ themselves in a room. The engineer’s job was to then capture the group in a way that best represented the live performance. Mic placement, crucial. Control of your instrument, essential. To this day these recordings are still among the most beautiful, take Frank Sinatra’s Time After Time or Thelonius Monk’s ‘Round Midnight. Both recorded in the late ‘40 yet the sense of tone, balance and space really is unmatched. Every little articulation is captured, somehow. Whilst it might seem basic in comparison to today’s standards, there were some pretty cool technologies being developed as recording became more commercialised. Record companies invested in employing electrical engineers to design and build recording equipment such as microphones, consoles and pieces of outboard gear such as compressors and equalisers. Again, some of this technology is among the most beautiful and sought after pieces of studio gear, take the RCA 77-A ribbon microphone or EMI REDD-17 console from Abbey Road Studios. 

This might be a good place to touch on what this technology was actually used for. So if you have ever seen a mixing console, you will have seen a bunch of dials, knobs, faders etc. Faders (on a macro level) represent a channel on the console. For explanation purposes, let’s say each channel is getting a signal from a different microphone. Faders, by sliding them either up or down, raise or lower the volume of the channel. This helps the engineer create a desirable balance between microphones, mixing in its most basic form. Often, musicians (particularly singers) will have a large dynamic range, meaning there is a large difference between the loudest parts and the quietest parts of their performance. This can be somewhat problematic at times. A quick workaround for engineers was to ‘ride the fader’, which is appropriately adjusting the fader volume to louden the quiet parts and soften the louder parts (early automation or what?). The compressor was developed to help out with this. Although it had many other uses in broadcasting, mastering etc. compressors take some of the ‘riding the fader’ work out performances. Using a series of amplification stages, a compressor squashes down peaks and brings up the valleys of a signal. Compressors can saturate a signal and produce some wonderful and very desirable tones as well as ‘glue’ mixes together. The development of this tool makes it pretty much the most important tool in the studio, both for practicality and creativity. 

Jumping forward to the mid ‘60s, along with the trending music of the time, music production was going through some pretty significant changes. An English rock and roll band at the time (you may have heard of them) called The Beatles, were having a few problems with over-excited fans at their shows. In short, they decided to stop touring and spend more time in the studio. This resulted in a run of some truly groundbreaking albums, the first being the previously mentioned Revolver. Along with their fabled producer or ‘fifth beatle’, George Martin, The Beatles pioneered some incredible production and mixing techniques that are still lorded today. They were the first to close-mic drums, use varispeed on a tape machine to change the pitch and formant of instruments/vocals and a super cool technique called ADT or artificial double tracking. This is featured on one of my favourite Beatles songs ‘I Am The Walrus’ from ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. A quote from Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend explains ADT much better than I can.. “You take a signal off the sync head of a tape machine and send it to a second tape machine set to record, and you then apply varispeed to the second tape machine, to get that signal a few milliseconds apart from the original signal. You then mix in the signals from the repro heads of both machines. This created a phasing, or wobble effect, depending on how you handle the varispeed.”
These techniques were sponged up and recycled endlessly by the musicians and engineers of the time. A worthy mention from that time is a pretty good guitarist you may have heard of by the name of Jimi Hendrix. Jimi, his band and his engineer, Eddie Kramer, created some of the most sonically compelling music throughout the late 60s using a plethora of effects. Most notably the use of tape delay, reverb, flanging and many more.
This might be a good place to touch on spacial effects in mixing. Reverb and delay are effects used in the mixing process to create a sense of space, depth and width among other things. Think of Ringo’s close-miked drums. Because the microphones are placed very close to the skins of the drums, what is picked up will be somewhat of an isolated sound of that particular drum. The idea of close-miking is to have the desired instrument void of any resonance from a room or space. Reverb and delay mimic different kinds of spaces. Reverb being a sound bouncing around in a large space such as a hall and delay mimics echos in a certain space. With these tools, you can put Ringo’s snare drum into a cathedral and make it sound humongous even if the microphone itself is only picking up the sound from the drum. 

Moving forward in time, again, the music changed alongside the recording equipment. Four track tape machines became eight track, then sixteen track. A notable album that pioneered the use of the sixteen track tape machine was Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, an undeniable classic. The cool thing about this album is the way Marvin used his own voice to back himself up. He had room to be creative with different tracks and wasn’t as bound by the limited options of a four or eight track. Another cool thing about that album is Marvin produced it himself. This term producer gets thrown around a lot, but touching on my introductory point, the producer (whilst still largely undefined) could be the middleman between engineer and musician. One who makes decisions on tone, colour, effects and to some degree, mixing. The development of recording skills, techniques and the equipment being used allowed artists to create immense sonic landscapes, textures and outer-worldly images. The producer being the driving force behind it, melding the use of mixing techniques with music. 

Some albums to check out from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s; Axis: Bold As Love – Jimi Hendrix (1967), Pet Sounds – The Beach Boys (1966), Curtis! – Curtis Mayfield(1970), Dark Side Of The Moon – Pink Floyd (1973) and many, many, many more….

Moving forward a decade or so things start to get pretty serious. Michal Jackson and Quincy Jones push sonic boundaries with Off The Wall and Thriller, an amalgamation of post-disco, glam-rock and RnB. With the addition of heavier instrumentation such as synthesisers and overdriven guitars along with recently developed large format recording consoles, the mix process became slightly more complicated. With large format consoles, the limitations became less of an issue. The mixdown involved bussing (routing multiple channels to a mono or stereo channel) and automation (motorised faders that follow a ‘drawn’ path by the engineer). Digital effects began making an appearance in the form of reverb and delay and fine tooth tone sculpting was possible using EQs and compression.  

Approaching the late 80s Tape recording reached a pinnacle. Stop reading for a moment and have a listen to Sting’s Be Still My Beating Heart off his album Nothing Like The Sun (1987). It is truly immaculate. Bright, yet rich. Smooth, yet still dynamic. This is another example of mixing having such a crucial part of making a song great. Whilst it was probably a very expensive process, using only the finest equipment and the best engineers I’d assume, the use of effects, EQ and compression takes the song to a whole new level. 

Some other albums to check out from the pinnacle of tape recording; Seeds Of Love – Tears For Fears (1989), Nothing Like The Sun – Sting (1987), Sign ‘O’ the Times – Prince, Alexander O’Neal – Alexander O’Neal (1985) and many, many, many more.. 

I want to take a bit of a detour from the cutting edge of the late 80s recording and touch a little on what was happening in the underbelly of pop music. Hip Hop had leaped out of The Bronx a decade or so before and was running through its paces as a counter-culture to mainstream pop. The history of Hip Hop and its relationship with society is an absolutely fascinating rabbit hole to dive down, but in order to keep this concise, I’ll leave it up to you to read about. ‘90s Hip Hop burgeoned what drummer/producer Questlove coined the ‘renaissance’ era, where kids were sifting through their parents’ record collection looking for  samples. Samples are little snippets of songs that have been cut out, effected and rearranged to create new songs. Producers magically pulled sounds from records and pasted them on top of breakbeats for the MCs to rap over using most notably a sampler/drum machine/all in one studio called the Akai MPC. The MPC was a relatively affordable piece of kit that allows producers to sample, record and to some degree – mix the music they created with it. Whilst the effects were somewhat limited, the profound ingenuity of the producers that used it made the MPC an immediate classic piece of gear. You didn’t need a huge studio and walls of outboard gear to create a great record. The magic of this era for me is hearing wonderful records from the ’50s, ‘60s and ‘70s recycled into something so new and fresh, take A Tribe Called Quest’s Scenario. It samples the drums off Jimi Hendrix’s Little Miss Lover in a wonderfully creative way.
Among many, two names that really stand out in the renaissance era of hip hop in this context are J Dilla; A genre bending producer from Detroit that religiously used an MPC 3000. Dilla is regarded as a production genius, somehow blending samples into a beautiful mosaic and pioneered new ways of using the MPC. Most notably he didn’t use the quantisation feature so everything felt super imperfect and humanised, particularly his drums.Bob Power; An engineer that worked with The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, D’angelo and many others. He helped mix hip hop productions in a way true to the genre like reducing the crackle of vinyl samples and effectively mixing low end that would break car windows. 

Some renaissance hip hop albums to check out are; The Low End Theory – A Tribe Called Quest (1991), Three Feet High and Rising –  De La Soul (1989), Labcabincalifornia – The Pharcyde (1995), Illadelph HalfLife – The Roots (1996), Fan-Tas-Tic Vol.1 – Slum Village (1997) and many many more…. 

This brings us to a turning point in mixing history. The evolution from analog to digital recording, now it gets juicy… Stay tuned for part two.