Why is it so hard? Well, mixing is kind of like therapy. When you mix your own music, it’s like trying to analyze yourself. You know something’s wrong, but you can’t get out of your head long enough to figure out what it is.

So you think about bringing someone else in. But it takes them forever to even begin to understand you, and man, the whole thing is so frustrating! Aargh!

Luckily, I’m into self-analysis, and I’ve begun to understand how to step out of myself, and gain a little perspective. And after working on my perfectionism a little bit, I’ve actually come to really enjoy the mixing process! It’s really rewarding to bring something down just .5 dB and feel it lock in. It’s that last frontier of getting the sound you want, making sure that things happen just the way you hear them.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with some Rules of Mixing. Really, I’m posting them for myself when I inevitably run into trouble again, but you can read them too.

1. Mixing is easy.

Doing things you have no proven skill at can be terrifying.  But if you've got good ears, and you like to learn, putting together a mix that does what you want it to do is easy.  Making a great mix is harder, but that comes with time.

2. Make decisions away from the mixing desk.

Every day when I leave the house, I listen to the work I did the night before.  I write down the things I notice in a little notebook I carry with me, maybe listen again, and that's it.  No pressure to actually make it happen, so I'm free to write anything I hear.  And when I get home that evening, I have a nice to-do list written out for me.

3. Isolate the problem and fix it.

I do tech support for my day job, and I like to code every once in a while, so I have a strong bug-fixing mentality.  I've already done the creative work on these songs, so the mix doesn't need to add anything new and creative.  I'll listen to a section, ask myself what I was going for, and then ask myself how it's different.  Sometimes it's easy, like "I want to hear all the individual harmonies more clearly." So I'll pan them all out a little more, maybe carve out EQ niches for them, and mess with their volumes.  Sometimes it's something more complicated, like "this doesn't flow well from the chorus to the bridge."  But by listening to different groupings of tracks together, I can tell which parts flow nicely and which ones don't.  Maybe I'll edit a part, maybe I'll just change the levels.  There's always something specific I can isolate and fix.

4. Take it piece-by-piece.

When I'm just about to start mixing a new song, it's easy to get overwhelmed by the mountain of things to fix.  So I make a list.  And I work on one thing at a time, checking them off as I go. Just the 1st verse.  Just the drums. Just the drums and the bass.  Etc.

5. Don’t be afraid to break the rules.

If it sounds good, it is good.  Even a little bit of reverb on the vocals makes them sound washy?  Get rid of it.  Out-of-tune harmonies more emotive than the tuned ones?  Keep 'em.  (But never ever release the stems.  Seriously, yikes.)

6. Mixing is refining, not building.

This is the most important one for me.  I've already built these tracks; I already love them.  All mixing has to do is bring out the things that need to be brought out - help tell the story that the music is already telling.  Make sure you can hear everything clearly, make sure all the arrows go in the right directions (both the little track-sized ones, and the big flow-sized ones.)

It’s been going well for me; I just finished mixing La Da Da Dee, and it sounds great! It might need a few tweaks here and there, but all in all, the bits that need to sing are singing, and the bits that need to bounce are bouncing. And most importantly, the transitions are transitioning. Whoo-hoo for mixing!

After: spent a while tweaking sloppy timing in In The Days. Spent another while pondering whether the sloppiness I’d just tweaked was what made the song work. Undid tweaking. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Tried out some different drum sample kits for La Da Da Dee. The verdict: the one I already had was the best.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move it along.

Eek.

Now I’m not sure which version I like better. The first one was too sloppy; every time I listened, I winced a little bit at the poor timing and the slapdashedness of the parts. So I redid the parts, one by one, thinking them through, practicing them, and making sure they worked well with each other. By the time I was done, that section was much cleaner. Much prettier. Hmm. Much duller?

I recall a conversation with a friend a couple months ago; he was suggesting that I get some other people playing on my album. His argument was that getting someone who actually played drums, for example, to play the drums would result in measurably better drum parts, and therefore a better album.

I resisted, of course. I had no good counterargument at the time, but over the course of the next few days, I thought about it. Why am I so resistant to having other people play on this album?

And then I remembered. That the true goal of artistic work is not empirical quality. It’s self-expression. I have things to say, and no one else says them the way I do. I have met literally dozens of better singers and better instrumentalists than myself, better ears and better stage presence and better looks, better whatever. But none of them could make this album. Not necessarily because it’s better, just because it’s mine.

What does that have to do with this bridge section? Well, it’s one thing to state your grand theories to the people; it’s entirely another to be able to stick to them. Every time I listened to that part, sort of pretty with airy vocals and strings, I remembered the Sufjan Stevens album Illinoise I’ve been listening to recently, and a little voice in the back of my head said “Sufjan wouldn’t have been so sloppy.”

Bah. So now I’ve got this new much prettier section with boring timing. What to do, what to do.

After that, I got to work on 4ths, which is definitely going to be the weirdest song on the record. I hadn’t touched it since January, so I wasn’t sure what would happen. I just left what I had alone, and started futzing around with a groove for the rest of the song. I like what it’s turning into; it’s very different from everything else on the record so far. More like the stuff I used to do when I was just fooling around with Logic and didn’t have to worry about song structure. Something nice to croon and scat and growl over.

Well, not done, exactly. But in a complete form. An arrangement I like from beginning to end. The drums could use some reworking, and the languid section of the bridge still isn’t right. But it’s at the point now where I could give it to someone and say “Here is a late draft of a song on my album.” Last week, the best I could have said was “here are some ideas for this song that’s going to be on the album.”

I love this working every day thing. I was talking to a friend about it; he was concerned that by forcing myself to do it every day, I was turning it into a job. I am! I now have the best job in the world! I love doing it, but most importantly, I have to do it. Even on the days when I don’t want to. Because something good will come out of those days whether I want it to or not.

This was actually one of those days. I put off getting down to work until 10 in the evening. It was just too hot. But I managed to pull it together and slog through. The turning point was a bit of self-indulgence, starting to work out harmonies for the chorus and the 2nd verse. My voice is total crap right now, so most vocals that I record are going to get redone, but I like to work out harmonies early so I can build parts on top of them. I recorded some harmonies, and the whole song really began to make sense. The chorus melody is the best part of this song, and it is coming together in this Sly and the Family way that I first envisioned two years ago and completely forgot about. Yes!

It’s amazing how one little piece of magic can give everything around it such a jolt. I really like the way this song is turning out. I can’t wait until it’s done.

It’s still a little disjointed. Parts will jump in out of nowhere on accented points, and fade away as easily. I’m finding that cellos really help to smooth things out. Just a simple line in the background provides a real nice pad. I’m totally lazy about my patch choices though. I’m just using the same basic Kompakt “Cello Arco” patch that I always use, and it doesn’t quite sound right. I suppose I could find something better, but I’d rather figure out the meat of things now, when it feels like I have all the time in the world. In a couple of months, when I start to panic, it’ll be nice to have something easy to work on.

But on the whole, i’m getting pretty close to have a full arrangement of this song. Once I do, that’ll make six full arrangements, two on the way, and one that just needs a day of piano and vocal recording. Of course, those “full” arrangements will still need tweaking, and the more I work on these songs that I wrote anywhere from one to three years ago, the more I think about writing new melodies. I’m constantly writing new tunes, but I don’t have time anymore to develop them as songs. I might sneak some on to this album as instrumental or, dare I say it, nonsense interludes. (Gasp!)

Here it was the question of straight vs. swung again. Well, not exactly swung.

When I started taking jazz piano in college, one of the first things my teacher Bill Brown told me was “Don’t swing. You can immediately tell the inexperienced players by the way they swing. All the modern players play straight.”

And he was right, in a sense. The concept of swing, as we’re taught it in high school, is hopelessly outdated. Whenever I hear that old stumbling broken triplet feeling, I picture Benny Goodman in a black-and-white film, entertaining the troops. (I don’t know if he ever made such a film, but the imagery all just pops together.) Not that he wasn’t great, but he’s dead, and so, in the traditional sense, is swing.

But I learned very quickly that straight wasn’t exactly what Bill meant either. When he played, the beat charged forward like a train. You never wanted to get off because the train was always moving. Even when he paused between phrases, the momentum carried you through.

That was my first lesson in lateness. That same year, Voodoo came out, and everything started to make sense. I realized that groove itself is built on departures and arrivals, on veering and returning, on cleanly and deftly swimming around and through time. That sometimes each beat is narrow, and sometimes it is very wide. That you can push them to your heart’s content, but only if you keep track of exactly where they are.

I know there’s a lesson for life in there somewhere, aside from the obvious (and not so obvious) sexual parallels. Darned if I can figure out what it is. Maybe it’s “don’t go off on tangents, unless you have to to make a point.”

In this case, I didn’t.

But that bridge is coming along. It’s beginning to fill with the languidity it needs, but it’s not there yet. Maybe I needed to write this to remind myself not to make it too square. Or to remind myself that the contrast of “straight vs. swung” is really much more subtle and complex than I initially imagined. Maybe my illness is still affecting my lucidity. (Actually I think that’s much more than a maybe.)

Or maybe I just like to yap.

I think I don’t actually like arranging my songs. I just love new ideas; when I work, I get excited about coming up with countermelodies and stringing them together, and somehow it all comes together. So tonight, when I sat down with La Da Da Dee, and tried to change the feel of one of the sections from swung to straight, I started to get really tense. I knew the general feel I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get there. I just wanted a part that you wouldn’t notice (which is something I often want in a rhythm section – if you don’t notice the instruments, it means they’re really playing the song), but I couldn’t make it happen. So I just looped a couple bars and played over them again and again.

Until, of course, I had an idea. And once I have an idea, lights start to turn on, and my hands move by themselves, and soon enough I’m nodding my head, yes, this is how it should be.

But I’m a little worried. I’m worried that I’ll end up not with 9 coherent songs, but with 9 collections of ideas, stuck together with chewing gum and common key signatures. My high school composition teacher once told me, after listening to one of my disjointed pieces, that I should write music for cartoons. I hope that Waiting doesn’t get the same reaction.