For those of us that wear reading or corrective glasses, this will sound familiar. The other day I was thinking about the song mixing process. There is as much magic as there is science in the combination of so many different sounds and textures into a coherent musical landscape.
Audio engineers also discuss or rather joke about the Mastering Dilema: how the mix is never really done. There is always something you can do to improve it. (in reality, at some point all we are doing is changing it, not improving.)
If you ask 100 different studio masters to mix the same tracks, you will get 100 different mixes! The ingredients will be the same but the flavor can literally be worlds apart!
Which brought me rambling to the eye exam process. For those not too familiar, you will sit in a dark office looking at a small poster of random upper case letters on the other side of the room. The optician will ask you to read as many letters as you can, as they decrease in font size each row and become smaller and smaller.
Then they swing a large instrument in front of your face that allows them to place a specific corrective lens very close to one eye at a time, as the other eye is closed. Looking for different parameters, the optician will change the lens to a different prescription, then a different one, then to a slightly different one. Asking, ” Can you see better with One or Two?….. With Two or Three?…..With Three or Four?….”
This goes on and on with variations so slight at times you have to ask them to compare again, and often you aren’t sure you made the right choice! This is what mixing a song in the studio can be like. You make changes and minute corrections and aural enhancements that individually no one will hear. It is often necessary to make your mix sound the way you feel comfortable early in the session, and stop. Finish it. Finalize it. Put it away.
It is done.
Put on your glasses and look as cool as you can.
MIDIMike
MidiMike 