Andrew Scheps at the University of Oxford - "What Comes Out Of The Speakers".

[Applause] hello I'm gonna try not use the mic just cuz Marty self-conscious enough without amplifying and it's not weird at all that I was sitting in the corner that whole time while you came in that's not good so when I first spoke to Dan about coming I thought well originally we were talking about doing workshops doing mixing so easy stuff sit in front of a computer say here's a compress or whatever and then we decided well it'll be more of a talk I thought well great I'll just talk about compressors that's easy and then I thought well no I'm going to Oxford I need to challenge myself and so what I've decided to do tonight is to talk about the things I think about which is not necessarily the things I do and this isn't a you know do as I say not as I do moment this is just the the things that go inside my head when I'm thinking about is it mixed good enough is it done what's the point all of that so I haven't given this particular talk in public so I'm gonna have to look at my notes a little bit and I might stumble a little but I hopefully will go off into the weeds and then we're gonna have QA where you can ask about compressors and that'll be easy compared to everything else so first of all I just like looking at this and listening to that playlist I am a lucky lucky man that is that is crazy so that's me and I'm here and that's today and what I wanted to talk about was not the mechanics of mixing or making a record or composing this I think there are there quite a few composers you know names as opposed to people who just mix and so I think these concepts are as relevant and one of the sort of interesting things about what's been happening in the music industry lately is because it's been decimated by downloading and now streaming and there's no money for anybody whatsoever there is still this sliver of it that's chasing money and you know there is the pop market and it's huge you know especially in Asian other parts of the world that pop market is massive and it makes lots and lots of money but for everybody else it's gone back to being a little bit more about the art unless about commerce because the commerce is so uncertain and I think in a lot of ways that's really great because for the last probably 50 years the recording business was just printing money so it all became about printing money and how can you do that and you always had artists within it and some of them would be successful in some wouldn't but now you're at a point where every artist can put their product out into the world right it's not just the ones who happen to get some money from a record label and go into a studio every laptop is a studio every room is a live room and you can make a record anywhere in the world and put it out the next day whether it's on YouTube where you go through a distributor and it's on all of the digital things that people can listen to it on so I think it's a really great time to sort of remember about the thousands of years of music that was before recording existed so composition could be a job and some of them are very high-paying jobs lots of court composers are plenty of buildings around here that probably had a composer tied to them or came up through there but the idea of music as art and for the definition of art I mean I've heard some people define it as something that you don't need to do to survive and if you do that then that's art and I that makes some sense but there plenty of things I don't need to do to survive that I would not call art and we don't have to talk about him in this room but I think that my definition of art as someone who tries to help other people create art and get out into the world is that it is something that you make that you present to someone else to try and elicit an emotional response that's art it can be a positive response a negative response it can be a protest sign it can be a song it can be a sculpture it can be a concept and I'm gonna be very pretentious later in the talk and we'll talk about the concept a little bit more but I love the idea of music as art because even if you're going for commerce you have to go for art because there were lots of records I've been working on where someone will make a decision based on what they think would be popular or that would be more like this other record but then if that record isn't popular what you're left with is a compromised piece of art because you've made decisions based on the commerce side of it which may or may not work out I mean how many people were on MTV Cribs before they cancelled the series not that many so the idea of making the music for its own sake and a record is a piece of art that happens to contain music which is also art so it's meta art or something ridiculous like that but the idea of record making as art as well and so when you look at making records that way I'm gonna use my remote now so the only thing that matters when you're making a record I'll talk specifically about making records because that's what I do so the only thing that matters is what comes out of the speakers that's it there's no argument you can make which would make me add something to that list it's what you get when you listen to the record that is the art and that's the art coming towards the listener the listener then reacts however they're going to react and every listener reacts differently because otherwise there'd only be one popular band everybody has different tastes but that's the idea of what comes out of the speakers now why is that important well I'll take you on a slight tour through my life but first let's talk about just recording in general so to be fair these graphics are all from yesterday so I've stolen graphics from all over the internet and most of them are not terribly good and completely inappropriate but let's talk about the difference between sound and recording so see if we can actually it's dead Oh stay okay so that's sound we're good with that it's it's actually water pouring out of somebody's skull but let's say this is something making sound in a room and that's not too far off from how chaotic and crazy a sound wave is in a room it's interacting with everything that's going on with the convection in this room because of the heat it's hitting walls and floors and bouncing back and you're getting my voice off of about 25 surfaces if you're sitting in the back of the room so this is the idea of sound in a room and this is when recording what somebody's doing now it can be a person singing it can be a piano it can be a guitar amp it can be anything but you make a sound wave right and then to make a record of that sound wave are we still working oh so you record it and traditionally there are two different ways to record it analog or digital so that's supposed to be analog up top digital on the bottom think that's pretty clear so the idea is you make a representation that you can store and then you can play it back later that's the idea of recording recording is just a delay that's all it is and you do it by taking a microphone or something like that which has this incredibly flimsy sheet and you make it like an ear drum and stick it up in the air and put it in the way of that total chaos that is the sound wave so that it moves the same way two sound waves moving and it creates either a voltage well it creates a voltage that's what microphones do and then you either record it on some bizarre analog format by converting it into magnetic fields or something like that or you digitize it by putting it through an A to D converter which we're not going to talk about tonight that's lecture eight of this series is when we talk about A to D converters so the idea being that you take this total chaos that's in the room that you can't grab you can't see you can't do anything except hear it and capture it and store it and once it's stored you can mess with it right you can EQ it you can compress it you can play it backwards you can pitch it up you can pitch it down you can do a million different things to transform that sound while it's in one of the forms on the right okay then eventually you take your transform bit play it out of a really jagged looking speaker and it's back out in the room so now pretend all that water is going into that person's head but only through their eardrums I didn't find a better graphic for that but the real point of this is though that that is total chaos once it comes back out of the speaker you do not have any control over it anymore it's gonna make its way through the air whether it's from an earbud to the ear drum so it's only traveling two and a half centimeters or whether it's from my mouth well we're talking about recording so recording of this out of a PA system which will never happen to the back of a stadium whatever it is it comes back out it turns back into chaos and then someone's ears get in the way and then they listen to it and then they have a reaction to it so that is recording in a nutshell the idea though that's very important we'll come back to this later is you do not have control over it once it's out of that speaker you have ultimate control over it before it comes out of the speaker so while you're working on it and manipulating it it's up to you to make it the thing that you want to come out of the speaker to elicit the response now the whole point of this is that's audio come on you can do it no I'm gonna use the spacebar because it's easier okay so let's let's look at a little list of things that don't come out of the speakers and what I want to do is group this sort of along my career and how this when I was a ardent enthusiast of things that did stuff when I was a kid you push a button and something else happens and that was amazing and that manifested itself in doing lights and sound for band in high school and then I saw recording studio for the first time and okay that's what I need to do and at the time there were two universities in the states that had four-year degree programs and my parents that you were getting a degree period so I had a choice between Berkeley and Boston and Miami University Miami so I decided to go to university Miami now while you're at the University as any of you who are at university or teaching University know you're surrounded by people who do exactly what you do they do it in different ways but they know the jargon they know the tools and it's all you talk about 24 hours a day seven days a week and sometimes you go home and you bore your parents with it but that's it you're in this tiny tiny little world and while you're a student at least for me you're creating art for lack of a more general word for what I made while I was in school arts kind of a stretch but you're making lots and lots of things that are really for just the consumption of your peers right it's not going out into the world unless you're really lucky or you're recording the choir here it makes two albums a year something like that you're make little pieces that you play at recitals for other people who do what you do and if you're lucky you write a piece that gets performed things like that so there are all of these things that you think about and you talk about and you talk about with each other and then yeah but these are the things I used to talk about cept the trouser things we call it pants but that's different here so I didn't want to you're always wearing pants when you mix right well I guess if you're in a kilt you might anyway so but the idea is I remember hundreds of conversations where I had done a piece in the electronic music lab or I'd recorded a band and I wanted to play it for somebody either someone else at school or my parents or my brother who's a very harsh critic and I would start by at least five of these things like by the way I compressed these drums it's so awesome and I used a phaser on the bass and the chorus and it's a little bit it's not as more because I didn't have the best microphones to use and they were set up in a weird way and the drummer wasn't that good and then you hit play and first of all you set people up for disappointment so it's a terrible way to go you just want to say this is gonna be great but also as soon as you hit play that's all erased and it doesn't matter it doesn't help to know that the drummer was terrible they're gonna hear that the drummer is terrible that's coming up as soon as you hit play so it is pointless to talk about these things but you do you do then you get out of university and you get into the world where now your work is going out to the public you hope the general public and I was incredibly fortunate to be doing small jobs on huge projects so I'm doing things for Michael Jackson and Metallica this is going out to lots and lots and lots of people and the the phrase I always use about this when you start making excuses and there's a whole nother set of excuses is does it start right away for that you can't go to everybody's house who buys the record and explain why it sucks it's not an option so you have to look at these things and then fix them and surpass them and get past the point where they even matter and I had a very very hard time with this when I started mixing more I used to always send an email with every mix and it would have some of these things in here like hey man really sorry about the way the chorus hits but it just wasn't happening and I don't know why and maybe it's you or maybe it's me but I can't really tell and again you're setting yourself up for failure but also nobody cares they do not care they hit play and they either like it or they don't and that's a really really important and very very difficult thing to hold on to as you're working I now type out long emails with all of these things in them and then I delete all of it and I say the mix is on the server sounds great and hit Send and sometimes they agree a lot of times they don't or it's somewhere in the middle but it doesn't matter because it's what they were gonna think anyway it's nothing to do with me saying I forgot to wear trousers when I mix this I mean it just doesn't matter plus if you're at a point where you forget to wear trousers there's all kinds of other problems that come with that so looking back on my career I should have realized this much much earlier because one of the first things I did was I got to go on tour with Michael Jackson which is what led to me working in the studio with him so we were in South America man a huge crowd now this is traditionally thought to be a picture of Michael singing crowd going nuts we were in I believe Brazil and does anyone here remember the song black or white does anyone remember the video on MTV heavy rotation so there's this whole little scene before the song starts kind of Back to the Future ish but basically there's a little kid up in his room with a guitar and a speaker the size of a house and he hits that opening chord and the song starts well the Michael Jackson concert things explode when he hits that guitar there's pyro everywhere and Michael comes jumping off a trampoline through the pyro and somehow always manages to land right on the downbeat of the song and the song starts now I was on tour because I was handling playback and there was a live band and they played but there was a lot other stuff going on and this one show he jumped through the pyro hit the stage and absolutely nothing happened nothing came out of the speakers it was crickets and tumbleweeds in a stadium with 40,000 people and I could have said excuse me Michael so four months and it really got do me and I know we have an air condition and the button got stuck so then when we hit a start instead of starting and nobody cares so that's actually him saying what the hell is going on not really but there you go so but I did not take that lesson to heart I was still sending emails about trousers and the bass and did you edit the drums years and years after this whereas this is the ultimate version and any live gig is that version right you can't you cannot explain away a bad gig if your mix isn't great you can just keep working on it so that's the joy of writing music or working on recording music is you can keep going until you think it's time to go okay so now we're gonna get to the slightly pretentious part of but if we haven't gotten there already I don't know we might have so I just wanted to sort of take this concept of what comes out of the speakers and zoom out and more of a form or of a composition angle and more of an overall art angle and it's I used to read articles I don't know why I don't read articles anymore but I used to read articles where there was a lot of discussion in literature about author intent versus reader experience and there are lots of people arguing that the author's intent absolutely did not matter and that made me so angry like what are you kidding they've spent months or years writing this book they have crafted every tiny word of it how can it not matter what they were trying to say and over the years I have swung completely to the others this argument it doesn't matter what they were trying to say all that matters is what you think they said because that's all you get out of it now I love to read interviews with authors about what they were trying to say because I always feel like I'm an idiot and I missed the point but if I just read the book all I get is the equivalent of what came out of the speakers that is it unless there's a 26-page forward that walks you through all of the big points that's all you get and that's really important and for composers it is as well and just a couple of small examples of this there was a documentary on Elliott Carter when he did he turn a hundred or did he not quite make it I went so it must have been his hundredth birth there's a PBS documentary which is the equivalent of the only good television station in the US and there was a piece of his being conducted by Pierre Boulez and they were having a conversation about the dynamics written into the score were these the dynamics that the instrumentalist should try and get out of their instrument or were these dynamics that the audience was supposed to hear because there are things written in odd ranges of an instrument so on the bass flute should they be over blowing because it's written triple Forte but it would only really get out at mezzo Forte or do they need to bring the rest of the orchestra down so that the bass flute could be the loudest thing in the room and this is a conversation that you have to have otherwise your piece is ruined what comes out of the speakers which is what comes out of the players is not what you intended there's also a great interview with John Adams on an American masters program another PBS show where he's talking about watching other people conduct his works and he's always invited you know it's always oh it's the premiere in this country so he will go but he's not conducting and he was talking about how much he hates to be somewhere where the conductor has found this tiny little internal stream line and brought it out like John didn't know what he'd written and he said he hated it because it completely changed the piece so given that there is a piece I'm just gonna perform the first two movements because we don't have a huge amount of time but there is a piece that is the ultimate expression of getting all of that out of the way so I'm going to put the score up here and I'll just follow it as we go I cut it the second movement a little short when I first heard about this this is the four minutes 33 seconds by John Cage it's based in three movements for any instrument and when I first heard about it when you hear about it you think well that's a joke that's not composition but apparently John Cage was just obsessed with silence the idea of silence and how to use it in music and one of the things he did was to go visit an anechoic chamber which is a chamber that has absolutely no acoustics of its own and he went in expecting to finally hear silence and if you've ever been even just in a quiet room you know that that's not what you hear you hear your own nervous system and the blood pumping in your ears and he realized that there was absolutely nothing that was silent and so what this piece was and was premiered at I can't remember which music festival it was but it was an outdoor venue so there were three walls to the venue and it's in the woods somewhere and it was a full four minutes in 33 seconds of David Tudor sitting at the piano and opening and closing the lid twice and the first 30 seconds everybody's thinking God would an idiot and then the next 30 seconds they're probably thinking government and apparently people were leaving but the idea was by about two minutes in if you gave yourself over to it you would experience whatever your experience of the room was and the piece had no influence on you whatsoever so now not only if you've gotten rid of the speakers the performer the conductor everything you've even gotten rid of the composer and so now this is in a way pure art because the listener experience is all there is there's nothing else there so that's kind of the ultimate end game to what I'm talking about man that was pretentious so just one other thing I want to talk about before I get to the kind of last ditch here is the one thing that music has and movies and TV - to some extent as art forms that other art physical art like paintings and sculpture don't have is the idea that you actually need playback this is actually I should have had the jack and white speaker on this slide but when you play something back it matters what speakers you play it on it matters what room you're in it matters what lewd the listeners in but that kind of goes with everything but there are all kinds of factors that just go to the playback of your piece of art that changed and I was trying to think of an example in art and I couldn't really think of one until I remembered I'm a huge fan of sight wombly a very abstract painter and his later paintings are all just big red swirls and that's it and I got a catalogue raisonné I pronounced that somewhat okay of his final works in every single page his red swirls and I'm a huge fan and even I just thought this is insane this book was so expensive and it's just red swirls and the books about this big beautiful prints and I didn't really think much of it because I'm still a fan and I would go see him everywhere I could and there was one time I was at the Tate Modern with my wife and in their permanent collection they owned quite a few Twombly 's and they had one gallery room which is probably about the front third of this room with one door so you walk in this door and on the walls are three of these paintings and they are massive and I laughed out loud when I saw them they created such an amazing emotional response I mean I'm feeling it right now just thinking about being in the room with these three gigantic red swirls and that's it and that John Cage's piece was actually inspired by white canvas paintings by Mark Rothko this idea of the size and the scale and we're actually gonna go see a Damien Hirst exhibition where there's a statue that's three stories tall the idea of getting in the room with that is amazing and that's very difficult for people who work with music so I think we actually have sort of the opposite side of this where we can't make something that's just massive because then someone's gonna listen to it on their iPhone so you actually have to create art that can transcend the playback system and transcend the speaker's that it comes out of so that what comes out of the speakers is always the same and always gets the same to the listener and I know I've been I mean I'm known for my punchy mixes parent I'm also known for my incredibly loud mixes but those incredibly loud mixes on laptop speakers are still aggressive and have energy and I think that that's something I've always strived to get is to have what's important about what I do not be reliant upon the playback medium because that's like relying upon a performer to perform your piece and I'm sure John Cage would have been appalled at that the timing was totally wrong I wasn't paying attention really I was just sitting there thinking oh my god I'm such an idiot so anyway back to this idea of playback already get to questions in just a few minutes one of the things I said before they think is really important and this is where this idea can actually expand out of the arts and just into your general life is that these recordings are the things you can manipulate right you have control over them you decide when they start and stop but as soon as you hit play with other people in the room you completely lose control and they go out into the world and that's all they do so now I've got some very graphics heavy demonstrations of how this can apply to the rest of your life so here are two people all right these are people in the world and we'll label them very cleverly that's the speaker get it get it okay this is silly but it's also at least for me it's profound in a way that isn't mind-blowing but it's something you have to continually think of over and over and over as a person we all have internal dialogues going in our heads and they can be all kinds of things good bad indifferent and whatever so you're thinking bad thoughts and this is this is how good my graphics are I couldn't figure out how to make that kind of like a thought bubble so just pretend that that's got rounded edges on it the speaker thinking about the audience is having these horrible thoughts if they then let those thoughts come out of the speaker the audience get sad this is not good right especially if that's your wife or your children or your co-workers or your students or your professor that's not the way to go the better way to go is to think stormy thoughts and talk sunshine this happens all the time you're on the way to a meeting you got an email about that meeting and my good god doesn't get what I want to do and you walk into me like hi how are you that's great and I really I got your email and I'm not really sure about this thing and then the audience is happy and you can coerce them into getting your way but if you don't you leave a legacy of storm but if you do this it leads to love and all you need is love so anyway reality is that that is a way you can think about your own legacy either as an artist or as a composer as a mixer as a sculptor or as a father as anything it's only what actually comes out that gets out into the world where you can't control it anymore that matters and it's all anyone will ever remember and if you're lucky you control it so that you keep the stuff you want inside inside and only the stuff that goes out goes out so end of pretension let's have questions about compresses what do you say so that's it that's all I have to say about that [Applause] easy one yes and think about coming through and they're in these now and they're back then just learning about how to that's and then how can we like meat this time that's I imagine to try America around must be over yeah I think I think though the core of what you're saying is starting with a not a myth but there's no such thing as sounds good I mean from an audiophile perspective there are people who will only listen to Steely Dan in the Yellow Jackets right but musically you're stuck with that because that's what sounds that way there are songs on early stones records where they use the cassette demo because it never felt as good so it's important that it sounds appropriate it's not important that it sounds good I just was listening as making a playlist for this podcast I did and they wanted a playlist and we talked about the Dead Kennedys and so I was diving through fresh fruit for rotting vegetables I'm not gonna say the name of the song I chose because it's not for hallowed halls such as these but it sounds terrible it's horrible but it's so exciting and I think with a band like Metallica I mean if you look at what Rick Rubin did on the album that he produces he tried to get their writing back to the way they used to write where it was about the riffs and these are seven and a half minutes songs with sections and it wasn't trying to be concise and write a four minutes song but I think there's as a mixer I'm always trying to make stuff sound great but the great is that when you get to the chorus it gets big and it gets heavy and it explodes and it's wide and it's more exciting you can't settle for something that you think sounds good and you can't force a band to not sound like what they want to sound like now the very end of your question where you said the band comes in and once you decide tune this and said like I'm the one who decides what I'm sidechaining or not side-chaining and so one of the things I love and it's actually I meant to talk about it in here I've moved from using lots and lots of equipment to just on a laptop and the joy of that is that nobody comes over I just send mixes so people actually just listen but it used to be they walk into this room full of gear which was up on the screen before and like hey what are you using on the bass oh man I that compressor and that was it they hated the base and you had to change it and it's that's just perception and that can hit every single part of the creative process it's writing a chorus a certain way because you think you have to to try and make more money so I think for mixing I'm always trying to mix what I'm given I'm trying to understand why did you give me this to mix and I'm trying to make it work and every once in a while I have to say there's something wrong and I'm going to fix it not my mix sucks because the song sucks but like hey that first chorus was twice as long as it should be I chopped it up and made a little re intro and I think this is better and you sort of go that way on the arrangement but in general I'm trying to just make the really exciting version of whatever I was given and sonically if that can sound good as well that's great but it's not the mission at all for me anyway which is why I don't have any engineering Grammys and may never [Music] yeah but they're on fire yeah though there are times when it's so is in so crackly that you actually can't pay attention to the music so it goes it swings you know it really does and it's finding that balance and deciding what you can use and what you can how to get out of it what you need so I'm gonna let them decide who gets to ask questions though because otherwise I'll get in trouble I don't I'm I was a hundred percent on gear until I wasn't and now I'm a hundred percent in the computer period and whether I'm using emulations of analog gear or not doesn't it doesn't matter I don't that transition was very difficult for me and it caused a lot of angst it's like my power is in the analog gear you know this is why I'm good and that's in that second list of things that don't come out of the speakers the gear doesn't come out of the speakers so I had to get over myself and realize that either I had the talent to be good no matter what the tools were and obviously you know to say that is a little disingenuous you do need a set of tools that are up to some level otherwise you just can't do certain things but there isn't a single plug-in I can't work without there isn't a single piece of gear I can't work without and I think that if I ever get to the point where I feel like I can't work without him I have to change and I've done that I've actually in the last month stopped using a compressor on my mixes that I've been using for the last 15 years both analog and in the computer and I finally changed the way it was set up so it would be a little bit quieter when I listened with it and that of course nothing sounds better than louder like no I don't need that compressor and I've actually managed to wean myself off it and it took forever but there's no I think for mixing it the process is completely irrelevant while you're recording the process can be relevant only in terms of how it affects the performers there are sessions that are great to do on tape because you're making people make decisions do you like that guitar solo or would you like to record over it not make a playlist it will be gone forever even if the new solo sucks and then we'll just have to do another one so you make these decisions along the way and I think creatively some musicians really thrive with that or some musicians need it but the analog versus digital as a gear slash process thing I don't I don't know for me right now it's not really that that's not a concept that makes any sense to me I just try and make them super loud and exciting how many people in the room don't know what it's talking about I just want to just want to find out because unfortunately rear bus has become a thing that I'm known for it's what did it's a stereo parallel compressor that I use while I'm mixing and everything in the mix except the drums usually goes to that stereo compressor and it's blended in so everything still goes to the mix buss there's nothing that ever the way I mix is all of the tracks go to the mix buss and then they also all go off to lots and lots and lots of other places the way you would think of using reverb czar delays but it happens to be distortion and compression and then all that stuff gets blended back in so the uncompressed version of everything makes it to the mix and then it's blended in with lots of over compressed combined versions so the rear buss is just the stereo compressor for lots and lots of stuff but it is a parallel one see that's easy talk about gear they do they hate me um there are some mastering engineers that just don't like what I do but then there's some who take what I give them and they're really happy with it because they don't have to do anything so it comes down to - just musical tastes really I mean because most of the successful mastering engineers have a thing that they do and they're pretty consistent with what they do so they basically have a mix chain they have compressors in EQ they like to put everything through when it's a really quiet uncompressed mix they can do that and then they get out the character that they like to put on mixes and I only sort of twig - exactly what was going on when I had a conversation with someone who's saying it makes it too loud I need quieter versions I said well but if I take that compressor off its gonna feel completely different and he actually said to me on the phone I hate the way you compress your mixes like oh right okay which is fine but then I shouldn't have him mastering my mixes someone else should be mastering so it is problematic my mixes have actually been getting quieter and quieter lately and I think getting rid of that compressors helped quite a bit but it's not I mean it's never loud because I think like oh the mix feels great now I'm gonna make it loud that's how the mix gets built and I'm always fighting it and I hate how loud they are I really really do I've got three different places in my template I can make it quieter and I'm constantly striving to make it quieter and quieter but still have it feel the same and there are people who will say well when you listen to the mix you can just turn it up well that's true but that's only if you're on something where you can turn it up if you're gonna listen through your phone or through your laptop speakers it's not gonna get that loud and it better sound huge coming out of something tiny and I have not figured out a way to do that without the mix being loud because that's what makes it do that it gives you the appearance of driving speakers and driving the air in a room in this sawed off waveform oh yeah mastery engineers don't like me but I just find ones that I can work with because the ones that like the way I do things will tell me when something's wrong and I actually believe them because the other ones are just telling me everything's wrong yeah you've got um yeah Catherine Brooks coming up right now they're they're a few it's it's look it's a it's a locker room every studio is a locker room I mean traditionally it was worse I think than it is now because you always went to a studio and there was always money which meant everybody was drunk all the time nobody acts right when you're drunk they're filter goes off right everything comes out of the speakers when you're drunk so I think that's part of it that it was just a very not friendly place for and even for men who had sensibilities you know you had to be a bro to get on in a lot of sessions but I think also I think it's it's this it happens across every single industry where if you walk into a room and you're there for so anything even slightly technical and there's a man and a woman in the room everyone assumes that the man is the one who does the job and the woman is their assistant or hanging out or whatever isn't the one there to do the technical thing so you immediately have a hurdle when you're a woman that you have to overcome where any guy can sit in the back of the room and suck at his job but no one questions why is there in the first place he actually has to screw up to get fired whereas a woman has to prove themselves to just stay in the room and it's not good but I think it's also why like Sylvia Massey does lots of artwork she does books she does a guerrilla recording that's become a thing and she loves doing it but you also make a name for yourself shooting a piano with a shotgun that's something that people say oh right Sylvia and so she's really really cool for that Katherine Marx has her thing there unfortunately as a woman I think you have to have a thing to stick around you have to have something that makes people think oh right that's exactly why words are there because it is questioned as soon as it comes up so I don't have an answer how to fix it at all I mean society is getting a little bit better now that you're actually allowed to accuse people of molesting you all of a sudden out of the blue but it's it's tough I should have stopped talking two sentences ago no you just record him I mean he's such a good bass player with all of these people it's what comes out of the speakers and for them it's what comes out of their fingers and it's what they play and how they play it so to record them you just get out of the way I try to make it as transparent as possible my microphone setups are very simple recording the Chili Peppers is one of the easiest things to do in the world you get natural sounding microphones in a decent sounding room and it's the Chili Peppers I mean that to me one of the most defining things about them is Chad's hi-hat I can spot Chad playing on anything from a mile away within one bar because his hi-hat does this weird swimming thing that no one else's does that's the chili peppers fleas bass is the Chili Peppers and surprisingly they've managed to go through three guitar players because I don't count the little spot in the middle who have all been part of the Chili Peppers and Hillel and John and Josh are all very individual guitar players but within the context of the band they sound like the Chili Peppers so it's just about getting out of the way and making sure that they're comfortable and happy and are hearing what it is that they're already doing coming back to them get away from it that's all you can do one of the genius things about mixing in the box I'm pointing at a laptop even though the laptop I use a slightly larger because otherwise it wouldn't be as cool you it's a hundred percent instant recall on everything right so I don't mix one song at a time when I get a record to mix I go through and do all the boring stuff first I prep the sessions like color code get the tracks in the right order import my template work on the drums to kind of get it working if it's a band with drums and then I mix the whole album and I'll do it in alphabetical order because that's easy that's the way the folder is so I open up a song and I work on it for as long as I know what to do and as soon as I feel like either I don't know what to do or I know what I have to do but I'm just not up for it like I need to deal with something that's gonna take me a long time and be problematic I just close it and open up the next one and I'll cycle through and every once in a while I'll cycle through starting at the bottom of the alphabet cuz otherwise you spend way too much time at the top of the folder and then I'm always surprised by how far along the mixes are because you open it up you're immediately fresh you listen and you only react to what you're hearing I'm reacting to what comes out of the speakers and nothing else because I don't remember what I did just before I closed it because when you're mixing on a console it sits there and you have these times during the day when you're not being productive so you just loop the mix and it's just playing and you check your email or you go to lunch and you come back but you still remember everything you did when you close it and open up the next song immediately that all gets wiped out and when you hear it you just hear where you're at and like oh right I need to do this so I never take notes on anything I just I'm always being led by what I hear and this way instead of having like if when you mix on a console if you think about it you usually get two times where you come back to that mix fresh one would be after dinner cuz lunch is never long enough and you're not far enough along and one would be the next morning if you're lucky enough to leave it up to print the next morning and then start the next mix before lunch so you're not along itself that's it if I'm mixing a record now I might get seven or eight times where I've opened up that song and heard it as if someone else had mixed it to this point and it's brilliant and it makes me get out of my own head it makes me only not pay attention to all those lists of stupid things I had up on the board it's it's really about not keeping track of what you've done up to a certain point and just reacting to where you are and the only way to do that is to either go to sleep for a long time or work on something else so work on something else if you can well when I mixed on my Neve console it had buttons for each speaker there was a left button and a right button if you put them both in it was in the middle if you wanted anywhere else you had to switch in a pan circuit which would drop the level and because it got quieter I convinced myself it didn't sound as good either I turned it up again and like no it's not the same so I've mixed very much hard pan left center right as soon as I moved into Pro Tools I goo put stuff anywhere because that pan circuits always active and if you put it there and it stays there as opposed to an old Neve where you put it there and it kind of wanders around a little bit in different frequencies go different places so I use panning a lot to make the arrangement work if you've got three picking guitars in a chorus or a bridge or something like that just messing with the panning to get either two of them to work together as one or to spread all three apps you hear all three I'm constantly doing that I have no preconceived notion of what it should be I like the kick the snare the bass the vocal in the middle as a rule but that doesn't always happen but for the most part it does then there like other stuff to be wide I love using plugins that stretch the stereo spectrum like what's the name of the isotope just put out the ozone stereo imager ozone imager I think it for free get it it's amazing you just go poor it goes full either from amount of a thing or a stereo thing so I love using spatial effects but I think that really that sort of spatial thing is to build your arrangement to get things to work together but then it's things like delays and reverbs and EQ if you dull something off it sounds like it's coming from further away so using that to try and get front to back that's where you make a mix that's really good if you're just really spread out here that's great but it's also very difficult to listen to after a while but if you can spread out that way then what it does is it lets the listener focus on the really important things the first four or five times and then start diving inside because they start to know the things that are up front and start to hear the weird little piano fill and the guitar reverb that's opposite the guitar and all of the really cool stuff that you did is a mixer which nobody cares about but if they love the song they'll get in there and find it so that's I try to use front to back I've just made this up I've never said this before out loud so it could be true but I think the front to back is where you kind of really build something that's gonna be a mix that really will stand the test of time as opposed to just spreading there left and right I have to write that down every single mix I've ever done every single one I mean sitting here listening before it's like yeah I'm lucky and those mixes suck yeah everything there's always something but but it doesn't matter you know it's that is the version of that song and if the artist was happy with it then there you go and there's some mixes where you do things because the artist wants them and it doesn't necessarily end up where you want it there's some mixes you do that you're absolutely thrilled with when you finish them and then you listen a week later you know or a month later what's good is it sometimes years later when you haven't heard it you can actually appreciate it because you've forgotten all the little stuff about it and you hear the big picture like 99 problems is one of those mixes which like wow that's actually pretty cool that's good in Danny California I think that's a do deny there are little things in there they're still bugging me but it will always bug you but it has to if you're not a perfectionist you're not an artist and there's a great saying that no record has ever finished they're only abandoned and it's true you could there's nothing to say that any artistic decision is right therefore you're never done making decisions you're never done working on anything ever you just have to stop otherwise you'll be someone who never puts out the one record that they've been making their whole lives so yeah it's actually when I do I do this seminars in France and mix with masters seminars and there are a lot of people there who are really really talented but they spend months on a mix of their own stuff my the best advice I can give them is start mixing that again from scratch and give yourself three hours because you know it inside out you know where everything is do a three-hour mix leave it for a week come back and tweak that and you'll be done in probably five hours total because you just get up your own you know no I mean yeah it's it's actually really good question because of course you would think then at some point I'm just giving up because otherwise how would I ever send a mix but I do I get to the point where in the short term I don't know what else I would do and it's not that I don't know what else I could do to make it better it's I don't hear anything that needs to be fixed anymore I get to the course and it goes it's exciting I get goose bumps in the bridge because I got the reverb balance on the vocal right all of that kind of stuff and I just get to the point where I don't know what I would do to it and that's when I have to send it sometimes it's done and sometimes I get comments back from the artists like hey did you mean to do this and it's something that's just crazy that I was so used to that I didn't hear anymore but it's much faster to have somebody else hear that and then fix it you know and that's the other thing about mixing in the computer I'm not on a time crunch for doing recalls and making changes it doesn't matter when it comes in I get an email can open up the session make changes and I'm hearing it fresh and it might be an hour later it might be three weeks later it doesn't matter but I do get to the point where I have no reservations about sending the mix for precisely the reasons I said before you can't fill up an email with all that stuff to explain why you're sending the mix now so you do have to get to the point where you think it's done or as done as you can make it without input [Music] I mean I could talk about it a lot but I won't but the only thing I'd say is you you have to mix for the way people are gonna listen but you don't mix in mono because iPhone speakers are mono because you're already at the point where their iPhone speakers you might as well buy yourself an AM transmitter and mix through that you need to know what's going on you can't build a mix where if you aren't hearing everything below 40 Hertz it kind of falls apart so you need to be smart and mixes need to translate the EQ in and even panning in mono is a technique that I never understood and I never came to terms with it and never worked for me for other people it works really really well I don't discount it and if it's something that works for you you should continue to do it I personally just have no it doesn't help yeah if you're producing I mean the most important thing is the songs there's nothing that matters more than that and then the second most important thing is the performance of the songs and the most important thing about that is the vocal if there is a vocal so you have to get that right and my favorite part of record making is pre-production because you're sitting in a room playing like human ProTools like hey let's make that two bars longer hey why don't you play a drum fill like that ooh the kick pattern in the chorus should line up with the bass and I love that but you very much have to change hats like if I'm producing an engineering which is usually case because there's never any money I will engineer for the first three or four hours and get sounds on everything and then I switch it off completely and if I'm lucky enough to have an assistant say just please tell me if something breaks because I'm not gonna notice at that point I'm only listening as a producer because I can't do both things at once and then when you start mixing it's really important to stop producing because otherwise you're mixing and the chorus isn't happening you're like hey let's put another guitar on there no you decided already that the arrangement was right there has to be a way to make it work and if there isn't you will exhaust every option trying to make it work and then go back and say well I guess I better put a guitar on here so I think it's really important to compartmentalize the jobs that you do especially because if you're a composer you're gonna do every job right you're gonna write it perform it mix it through all the pre-production yourself arrange it it's it's brutal and I think that if you try and do it all all at once and solve production problems by writing or mixing problems by recording you're never gonna finish it's impossible I'm not I'm not that great at that but it's the coming back to the mixed fresh I mean I come I know that I'm a really picky horrible consumer I hate everything so I know that so I have to make myself like it whereas like Rick Rubin is the ultimate consumer he happens to share tastes with millions of people and that's why people buy the records he produces but you're always making the record you want to hear with the caveat that it's not your record it's the artists record and you have to make the record that the artist wants to make and hopefully you make that version line up with how you want it to be but you are subservient to the artist but just as a pure producer you are the consumer so you have to make your decisions based on you as the consumer all the time a lot a lot it's just there there were reasons for logistic reasons of moving and not having a great room to set up my speakers things like that so I started doing work and headphones thinking well when I get onto the speakers I'll do the heavy lifting and as I've gotten more and more used to them I just do less and less saw less and less means to be done on the speakers the great thing about it and any recording professor will hate me for this because they will say you need to mix on speakers and you do especially when you're learning but the great thing about headphones is you are wearing your studio you don't have to worry about the fact that you're in a rectangular bedroom that has horrible acoustics you're wearing it it's the room as well as the speakers so if you can manage to find headphones where you can actually hear what's going on and not create problems for yourself it's amazing it's brilliant and it frees you up to work absolutely anywhere and be confident about what you're doing as opposed to second-guessing which as soon as you get too comfortable with a pair of speakers in a room anything about that changes and you second-guess everything you do because you're not sure if you're hearing it right cheap headphones just buy another pair break them in for an hour-and-a-half and you're good so yeah I'm a I'm a fan of headphones but it's difficult oh we have to go eat [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Music Faculty: University of Oxford

Views: 216,914

Rating: 4.9296966 out of 5

Keywords: #Andrew #Scheps #andrewscheps #oxford #university #mixing #music #lecture #talk, empres

Id: HVCdrYbUVW8

Length: 60min 16sec (3616 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

His voice is hypnotic. I could listen to him for hours, which is kind of a good thing considering he has so much experience to share.

[u/MMM187]

I had the pleasure of meeting him once, he was super kind and very willing to share knowledge. Great video.

[u/solidtrax]

Great talk. And a bit different what you expect from Andrew. Funky and Funny too!