This is following on from a piece of writing:
Tracking The Lab ‘Stormbringer’.A week after tracking ‘Stormbringer’ “Wilbur” and I were booked into RMIT Studio 3 to mix it. We were supposed to mix it as a group project. An abstract idea that is questionable in practice, and which warrants consideration.
I got to Studio 1 a little after 10am. Tok and the tracking group for that week were just barely beginning to set up. I got the key to Studio 3. “Wilbur” didn’t meet us in Studio 1. I generously commented, “He can’t be far away – he only lives in Carlton.”
I unlocked Studio 3, powered up the studio (it’s mostly on a central switch), loaded the session from my hard drive, and fired up Protools. I wasn’t getting any signal to the monitors, and after troubleshooting other possibilities, I concluded the problem was the (horrible) antiquated Tascam digital desk that drives Studio 3. I walked back down to Studio 1 (I left a note for “Wilbur” on the door of Studio 3), and let Tok know I’d need a bit of help with the Tascam desk. He said he’d be there ASAP.
I went back to Studio 3, and revised the Protools User Guide – the same chapters I’d been revising on the weekend. “R.T.F.M.” is an acronym for
Read The Fucking Manual, and as with any professional recording program, that approach gives you the keys to the kingdom. I read five chapters waiting for Tok to pop over to help with the desk.
I called Tok on his mobile – and explained that it was 2pm, I still didn’t have audio to the monitors, and I had a band member coming in at 5pm to consult on guitar edits.
I finally called Tim Johnston (his number was on the wall), and he talked me through the reboot procedure for the Tascam desk. The reboot procedure resulted in the LCD screen going blank except for the words FATAL ERROR.
While I was on the phone, Tok showed up at Studio 3. He got the Tascam to fire up properly, apologizing for the lameness of the desk. He was surprised “Wilbur” had still not shown, and said, “If he doesn’t turn up soon, I can’t pass him on the project, as he’s only done half the work.”
Tok then gave me a quick introduction to a HD EQ plug that I’d never used before, EQ’d some drums with me, then trundled back to Studio 1.
I got to work on EQ-ing the rest of the drums and instruments – very much an experiment, making educated guesses with settings, listening to the result, comparing the EQ settings Tok had used. You have to give yourself permission to have a learning curve with this sort of stuff.
At quarter to 3-ish the fire alarms sounded at RMIT Swanston Campus, and we were evacuated. I never found out if it was a fire, a bomb scare, or a drill.
We were allowed back onto Campus around 3.30. I got back to work on the mix. I called Scott to let him know that I was the only one in the studio, and it looked like “Wilbur” wouldn’t be allowed to re-join the project, and this was shaping up to be a worthwhile mixing experience for me.
At around 4.30 “Wilbur” knocked on the door of Studio 3. I told him, “You’ll have to go see Tok.”
I was expecting Tok to prohibit him from joining the mix project 6+ hours late. If TAFE follows a work-model, as it is supposed to do… you would be fired from a job for turning up to work that late. For it to be justified, you’d need a death in the family, incapacitating illness, or to be hit by a bus.
“Wilbur” came back to Studio 3 about twenty minutes later, teary-eyed, and said Tok said, “Just do the best you can.”
Which is what we were both damned to – the best “Wilbur” could do. I felt really put-out that he was allowed in after skipping the day. When I asked him what happened, he said, “My alarm on my phone didn’t go off.”
I said, “But it’s nearly 5. Don’t you have any clocks in the house?”
He said, “No.”
I said, “You need a sundial. Then you could go outside - and even if it was cloudy, at least you'd see daylight.”
Had he been up until 5am, mucking around on the internet the night before? I guess we’ll never know.
So “Wilbur” sat in the chair beside me, staring red-eyed at me working, and criticizing my limited use of key commands in Protools. “Why do you do it that way? Takes longer.”
“I really don’t think the person who showed up six hours late should be talking about things taking too long.”
Trying to make the best of a shit situation, I gave him a quick run-down of what I’d done, mentioned Tok got me started on this EQ plug-in. Wilbur asked to have a look at the EQs. When I opened up the Kick Drum EQ, he said, “Whoa. That’s really good. Tok did that… O, sorry.”
I said, “That’s all right. I’ll always remember that you said that, and
I’ll hate you forever.”
Since I had no choice, and as he had done zero work on the mix, I had to surrender a large part of the remaining studio time to “Wilbur” sinking his hands into the mix. I tried to focus him on particular tasks, so I could still have some sort of organized mental snapshot of the relative proportions of different tracks within the mix. That’s incredibly important, and helps with sorting out problems arising when certain frequencies on one track start to interact with the rest of the mix and create issues of clarity or balance.
I still had to go to the toilet like a normal person, so couldn’t be supervising “Wilbur” every moment.
Scott showed up around 6. We started working on the guitar edits. We had three takes on three different tracks, of the same guitar part. Different sections of each take were better, and the time was tighter, looser, or groovier. We were aiming to have two comped takes, that could be hard-panned L and R respectively, and the slight differences between the take in each speaker would make for a really fat sounding guitar. We worked out which takes had better qualities in various versus and choruses, and comped the three takes into two. (Worth mentioning, in a real industry situation, we’d have had
way more than three takes to comp together.)
Then we got down to putting in some limited use of effects and reverb, and just mixing the parts. I’d put the vocals low-ish for two reasons – because I was leaving them till last, and because they were the least important part of
this song. The vocalist was the bass player, and he was only an emergency singer delivering “Plan B” lyrics. In the real world, when The Lab found a permanent singer, I’d be re-recording the vocals – hopefully much better than what Cam delivered.
I’d been adjusting my entire mix with a concept of the vocals – and awareness of the energy they take from the rest of the mix, and an awareness of the main part and the harmony part being dictated by the harmonic relationship to the chord progression – one vocal part had to sit further back – however, it didn’t sound right, and I turned to “Wilbur” and said, “Did you change the vocals?”
He said, “Yeah, I turned them up.”
I said, “I placed them back for a reason. Right now we’re treating them as an instrument.”
And Wilbur very grandly announced, “Vocals must be the loudest thing, because the lyrics are the chief conception in the musicality of the song.”
It must be the sort of thing that makes you a stronger person “within yourself” (as opposed to elsewhere).
We’d been working on a mix for ages, with these completely different proportions from the concept I had organized in my head. Now it’s difficult to explain, but mixing is kind of like editing a piece of writing – or finishing someone else’s wet painting – except that even with Protools, it is largely not a visual process. Keeping the relative proportions in mind is really important. And it just hit me how impossible it was to achieve a true state of balance engineering if you had two different people, with different ears, and different concepts of what the mix should be, playing musical chairs and taking turns sinking their hands into the mix. The project had no artistic integrity, and it could never have any artistic integrity.
So I gave “Wilbur" free reign – “I think you should mix the lyrics any way you want, we will trust your ears, because you put so much work into EQ-ing the vocals.”
We finished the mix at about 11.55pm. Scott, who gets up at 5.20am to go to his day job as a tradesman, was just about hating being there. He told me later he regretted coming in. It wasn’t a good experience for him, having to deal with two mixers, who couldn't possibly mesh their vision – it was an academic exercise, nothing like working with his usual engineer Theron Rennison.
While waiting for the final mix to bounce, "Wilbur" regailed us with stories about how drunks threw eggs at him, apparently because he is asian.
We said, "Some people are just idiots."
I silently wondered if he would ever mature enough to equate the egg throwing, and his "I don't mean to push a woman into working" comment, as essentially the same thing.
Finally done, we tried to leave the campus – but, lucky us, we were locked in.
Back in Studio 3 we called the RMIT Night Guard number, but just got an answering machine. So we called the police. The police called the security company and got through, and the guard called me on my mobile. We finally got out of RMIT.
Bummed out. Scott regretted ever coming in for the mix. I couldn’t believe what a waste of time this second half of the project had been, or how much “Wilbur” had got away with lazy and incompetent behavior, and how much that had disrupted the quality of my learning.
And I gradually began to realize that these group mix projects – which cannot really be called MIXING, if you know what mixing is – were a complete waste of my time, because there was no pedagogical value in the exercise – it was just a way of cramming too many students into facilities that couldn’t accommodate them, and satisfying national training package competencies on paper (if not in reality).
So many reasons why I deserve more...
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