[MUSIC]
So, let's talk about the technical parts of the record.
First off, let's talk about performance.
Timing.
Are the players playing together?
If there's only one player, are they playing in a good, solid tempo?
What about intonation?
Are the players in tune?
Are they in tune with each other, as well as themselves?
Is the vocalist in tune?
Then let's start talking about tone.
Are we getting the tone that we want?
If it's a classical recording, there's very,
very specific expectations about tone and the excellence of tone.
If we're talking about pop music, that's much more fluid.
We could be looking at some distortion.
We could be looking at more raw, kind of unusual tones, but
is the tone doing what we want it to do?
Then there's kind of the X-factor, the connection of the vocalists,
say, to the lyric.
Are they putting that lyric across in a way that really makes us listen and
understand what's going on in the story?
So, the performance aspects are very important.
Then we get into the compositional aspects, and we start there with,
say, melody and harmony.
Is the melody doing what we want it to?
Is the harmony supporting that?
Is all this coming together?
What about the lyrics?
Are the lyrics as strong as they can be?
Are they fitting together right with the melody?
Is the prosody strong?
We'll talk about this more in the coming weeks.
One of the most important aspects of any composition is the form, and by that we
mean the different elements, the different sections of the song or the composition.
Are they coming together in the right way?
Do they build?
Do they keep us interested?
Do we feel as though they're taking us on a journey?
Does the chorus pay off when we get there?
Does the whole thing build up to some sort of a climax that really gives us a reward
for sticking around and listening to this whole piece of music?
So, the form can be incredibly, incredibly important.
Then we start listening for
the technical aspects of the recording itself, for the recording and mix, and
one of the first things that I listen to is the vocal placement.
Is the vocal placed in the right place vis-a-vis the other instruments?
What about the intelligibility of the vocal?
Can we hear every single word of the lyrics if we want to,
to be able to know what's going on in the story?
Also then, in terms of the vocal placement, how close or far away is it?
Is there a lot of reverb on it?
Now, reverb tends to make the vocal seem as though it's further away from us, and
we call that being a very wet vocal.
As we dry it up and take reverb off, or don't put it on in the first place,
it gets closer to us, and sometimes that can be more intimate.
That would be a dry vocal.
Then we get into the other instruments.
What about the impact of those?
What's the thump like of the kick drum,
the thwack of the snare, the click of the pick on the guitar?
What do we want to have happen in terms of the impact of those instruments?
Then we have the idea of tone.
What about the tone of the instruments themselves?
Sometimes we're after a lot of clarity.
Sometimes we're after a very hi-fi recording where we can pick out every
single instrument.
Other times, we're more into trying to mush these things together and
have them act more as a unit and be a little less defined.
One of the other really important aspects of a mix is the focus.
Are we giving the listener enough cues to know exactly what the focus is
at any given time, where we want them to listen the most,
where we want them to put their focus at any given time in the recording?
And then there's things like effects, and these can be important parts of the mix.
Reverb, delays, distortion, or they can be ear candy, and
if that's the case, are they distracting from the focus of the record or
are they really adding to the overall effect?
There's a lot of things to think about here.
There's performance, there's composition, there's the technical side of the record.
All of these things, actually, as technical as they may be,
we have to keep in mind that they're all in service of, you guessed it, emotion.
As you're listening to these technical things in the recordings,
we always want to be thinking about how is this affecting the emotion of the record?
Stephen WebberDirector of Music Production, Technology and Innovation
