The Three Keys To A Great Mix

Most recording engineers spend a long time learning the fundamentals of mixing. For sure, instrument balance, frequency balance and dynamics control are important, and you've got to have those in the first place for a mix to be any good. 

But for a mix to be great, you have to go beyond that. Here are the three keys to a great mix:

• Figure out the direction of the song. For a mix to be great, it needs the perfect direction. In other words, if the song has an arena rock feel to it, you don't want the direction of the mix (the sound) to be intimate and in your face. Likewise, if the song is soft and sensual, huge bombastic reverbs won't be the right choice either. The songwriter and the artist usually have the best idea for the correct direction, but don't be afraid to experiment either.

• Develop the groove and build it like a house. Every song, no matter what the genre, has a groove. The groove is the pulse of the song and how the instruments breath with it. For the mix to be great, you've got to feel that pulse, therefore you have to find the instruments that supply that groove, starting with the most important (usually the bass and/or drums in most music, but not always). When you find the instruments that supply the groove, then you build your mix around them.

• Find the most important element and emphasis it. This is usually the vocal or lead instrument but not always. Sometimes it might be an interesting rhythm part or an instrument that's playing a hook or has a hooky sound. Whatever it is, you've got to find it and emphasis it, because that's what sells the song.

For a more on the three keys to a great mix, check out the Mixing Engineer's Handbook.

Key Internet Milestones

Key milestones in the development and growth of the Internet according to the Associated Press:

• 1969: On Sept. 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. The first connection between two sites — UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. — takes place on Oct. 29, though the network crashes after the first two letters of the word "logon." UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah later join.

• 1970: Arpanet gets first East Coast node, at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass.

• 1972: Ray Tomlinson brings e-mail to the network, choosing "at" symbol as way to specify e-mail addresses belonging to other systems.

• 1973: Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway.

• 1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true Internet. Concept later splits into TCP/IP before formal adoption on Jan. 1, 1983.

• 1983: Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ".com," ".gov" and ".edu" comes a year later.

• 1988: One of the first Internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers.

• 1989: Quantum Computer Services, now AOL, introduces America Online service for Macintosh and Apple II computers, beginning an expansion that would connect nearly 27 million Americans online by 2002.

• 1990: Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

• 1993: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first Web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page, opening the Web to the world with software that is easy to use.

• 1994: Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, piquing the interest of Microsoft Corp. and other developers who would tap the Web's commerce potential. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services.

• 1995: Amazon.com Inc. opens its virtual doors.

• 1996: Passage of U.S. law curbing pornography online. Although key provisions are later struck down as unconstitutional, one that remains protects online services from liability for their users' conduct, allowing information — and misinformation — to thrive.

• 1998: Google Inc. forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. U.S. government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Justice Department and 20 states sue Microsoft, accusing the maker of the ubiquitous Windows operating system of abusing its market power to thwart competition from Netscape and others.

• 1999: Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. World Internet population surpasses 250 million.

• 2000: The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. Amazon.com, eBay and other sites are crippled in one of the first widespread uses of the denial-of-service attack, which floods a site with so much bogus traffic that legitimate users cannot visit.

• 2002: World Internet population surpasses 500 million.

• 2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.

• 2005: Launch of YouTube video-sharing site.

• 2006: World Internet population surpasses 1 billion.

• 2007: Apple Inc. releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless Internet access.

• 2008: World Internet population surpasses 1.5 billion. China's Internet population reaches 250 million, surpassing the United States as the world's largest. Netscape's developers pull the plug on the pioneer browser, though an offshoot, Firefox, remains strong. Major airlines intensify deployment of Internet service on flights.

• 2009: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the first major daily newspaper to move entirely online. Google announces development of a free computer operating system designed for a user experience that primarily takes place on the Web.

Music Troubleshooting Checklist

Every musician, band member, producer and engineer has run into this situation many times -the song you're working on just does not sound right, but you can't figure out why. That's why I created a Music Troubleshooting Checklist, which will be part of a series of laminated cards in the near future. You can find out more at my website.

Here are the questions to ask if that song you're working on just doesn’t sound as good as you think it should.

• Do all the players in the band know their parts inside out? Is there a part that someone is unsure of?

• Are all the players performing their parts the same way every time (assuming that you’re not recording some forms of jazz and blues where you want a different performance)? Any variation can lead to a section not gelling or not being tight.

• Is the band playing dynamically? Does the music breath volume-wise? Does the verse have less intensity than a chorus or bridge?

• Does the band lose its drive when playing with less intensity? Does it forget about attacks and releases when they play quieter?

• Is everyone playing both the song and section starts and stops the same? If not, ask every player, “How are you playing it?”

• Does the band sound tight? Are the attacks and releases of phrases being played the same way by everyone? Are the builds, turnarounds and accents being played the same way by everyone? If not, ask every player, “How are you playing it?”

• Is the band in tune? If not, make sure everyone uses the same tuner and tunes the same way.

• Does the song have a groove? Is the rhythm section playing in the pocket? Is the drummer or bass player slightly wavering in tempo?

• Is the tempo right for the song? Try it a BPM or two faster or slower and see if it feels better.

• Are all vocals in the best range for the singers? Does the singer have trouble hitting all the notes? Does the singer sound comfortable singing and is the vocal sound right for the song?

These questions will help you fix most problems that you're come up against in any genre of music.

Roxanne Shante's Real Life Revenge To Warner Music Group

In the ultimate case of life following art, recent Cornell graduate Dr. Roxanne Shanté (best known for the hip hop "answer" classic, Roxanne’s Revenge) got her own personal revenge on Warner Music after she forced them to honor a clause in her contract which required them to pay for her education for life.

"They kept stumbling over their words, and they didn't have an exact reason why they were telling me no," Shante told the Daily News. WMG, who was on the hook for the full amount of $217,000, only started writing checks after she threatened to go public with her story. She signed the contract with the giant label when she was 14 years old, sold 250,000 copies of a single that spawned the "answer" rap craze, but never received a penny in royalties (where have you heard that one before?). Shante is known for her ability to improvise entire songs, and Roxanne's Revenge was reportedly written while it was being recorded.

Shante' believes that Warner considered the clause a throwaway, never believing a teen mother in public housing would ever attend college. This is sort of like Fox Pictures giving George Lucas the merchandising rights to Star Wars, never believing that it would amount to anything (although on a completely different scale).

The lesson here is to never be afraid to ask for anything when negotiating an agreement, no matter how outrageous it may seem at the time. You never know when the outrageous item just might turn in your favor.

The End Of iTunes?

Apple has recently approved the new Spotify app for the iPhone, which may have implications that go way beyond that of a normal phone app.

For those of you who don't know about Spotify, it's a Swedish streaming music service that has taken Europe by storm. In fact, England alone now has over 1 million subscribers, which is pretty incredible considering that there's only 60 million people in the country!

What people like about Spotify is it's iTunes-like simplicity and the fact that you have access to over 6 million songs (almost as many as iTunes). But unlike iTunes, Spotify is a subscription service, costing about £10 a month (about $16 US).

Industry pundits have been saying for some time that the future of the music business is in subscription, and of course, the record labels love it since they'd be getting a set amount of money every month (just like your cable company). In fact, they like it so much that all the majors have invested in Spotify, which puts them even more at odds with their artists, who are all pretty sure that they won't be seeing too much of the income given the "interesting" accounting the labels use.

To give you an example of the money we're talking here - if you have 10 million subscribers at just $10 a month, that's $100 million dollars! And that's projected from the US alone. It's great for the labels because it's a consistent income stream. It's great for the subscriber because he can access 6 million songs for $10 or so a month rather than getting only 10 songs from iTunes. But no one knows how that income will be shared with the artist, and that's what they're scared about.

But there's more. Why would Apple approve an iPhone app that would make the iTunes store potentially obsolete? Would it rather sell iPhones and iPods than downloads? Probably.

But don't be too shocked if Apple has a surprise up their sleeves, like a subscription service of their own. Could we be seeing such a September surprise at their "Let's Rock" announcement next Tuesday?