Mix Rescue: Strong Arrangements

Photo: Chris Boland www.chrisboland.com

The foundation of a good, engaging mix is a strong arrangement. But how far can you go to improve things at the mixing stage?

When SOS reader Trevor Piggott recently sent me over a mix he was struggling with, I could hear that the sonics lacked some clarity and punch compared with the Bob Clearmountain mix he was referencing against (the Simple Minds song ‘I Wish You Were Here’), and that the lead vocal wasn’t commanding the listener’s attention enough. There was, however, another more insidious malaise, because he’d also fallen into a trap that ensnares many project‑studio users: relying too heavily on repetition, especially of the copy‑paste variety.

It’s an easy thing to fall into, and often goes like this. First you create a four‑bar pattern with maybe drums, bass, and some chords, and then you quickly copy‑paste that so you can crack on with writing a song over it. By the time you’re done, you’re beginning to get a bit bored with the bare‑bones arrangement you’ve heard looped so many times, so you begin adding more parts to freshen up the pattern. But while each new layer does re‑enthuse you at first, its novelty inevitably declines with repetition as you work, eventually leaving you with an arrangement that, despite being saturated with musical parts, leaves you with a niggling sense at mixdown that something’s still missing — no matter what processing or effects gizmos you try.

In this article, I’d like to share some of the practical arrangement and mixing techniques I typically use to address such issues, and show how I used them to rework Trevor’s production, upgrade the mix sonics, and reinvigorate his enthusiasm for the song.

Once Less, With Feeling

One of the first things I did with Trevor’s song was look for opportunities to shorten the structure. After all, if any kind of musical pattern gets staler the more you repeat it, why not simply reduce the number of repeats? As it happened, there was an eight‑bar instrumental section that was treading water between the second chorus and the onset of the guitar solo, so removing that was an easy win. But there were also two separate intro sections that delayed the arrival of the first vocal verse until the 30‑second mark. I chose to sort of fold those into each other, to get to the lyrics 10 seconds sooner. On a smaller scale, I also pruned out a few repeated sections on a per‑track basis, muting the bass guitar during the introduction, progressively weeding out more backing‑vocal layers for the earlier choruses, and removing the chorus piano hook from the guitar solo section (where the backing track was plenty busy already).

One easy way to differentiate the sections in your arrangement and provide more of a sense of build‑up through your song is to reserve some sonic layers for later in the timeline — as you can see Mike doing here with some of the chorus backing‑vocal tracks in his remix.

Simple cuts like that will only take you so far, though. Another more useful strategy is to modify some of the repetitions so they sustain the listener’s interest better. If you think about it, exact repetition is actually quite an unnatural thing in real‑life music‑making, because human musicians never really play the same thing twice — indeed, that’s an inherent part of the magic of the live gig experience! So in this case, when I realised that the main piano riff comprised three repetitions of the same rhythm, I decided to edit the second one into a slightly different shape. Similarly, the chorus’ main lead‑vocal melody comprised a pair of identical lines which I was able to transform into a slightly more interesting ‘call and response’ pairing by shifting the final note of the second line to a higher pitch. A melodic clean guitar riff that looped through the pre‑choruses and choruses was edited so that the pre‑chorus version became much sparser and simpler, which meant that the chorus iteration then felt like a musical development, instead of a straight copy. And there were multiple instances where I was able to mute individual instruments for a moment just to kind of remind the listener of their presence — most notably the drum kit just before verse one and during the first half of verse two, and the bass guitar just before the final choruses.

Difficulties with the click track during the tracking sessions had led the band to build their original drum track from short loops of the drummer’s playing, but this robbed the song of both short‑term musical variations and long‑term performance dynamics. To remedy this, Mike first reconstituted and synchronised the original continuous drum track using detailed edits, and then enhanced the section differentiation by thinning the track count at strategic moments.

And, of course, if you go to the trouble of capturing live performances, it’s a shame to squander their humanity by subsequently looping sections of them — which is what the band had felt obliged to do here with their live drum tracks, because of difficulties maintaining the song’s swung groove against the click during recording. Fortunately, they’d archived the original live take, so I was able to re‑import that into my mix session and use editing to deal with its timing issues directly instead — this meant I could retain all of the player’s nice little musical accents and pattern refinements. And, while I was at it, I decided to pare back the drum kit texture during the first 40 seconds of the song by muting the room mics and tom close mics and low‑pass filtering the kick‑drum and snare close mics, thereby giving more scope for the drums to build up through the timeline.

Stealth Layers & Arrangement Build‑up

Where regular editing methods don’t provide enough scope for introducing variation, a great alternative can be adding ‘stealth’ layers to supplement the existing parts. I used this tactic for the echo‑y triplet guitar chords that underpin most of this song, EQ’ing a stock Jazz Guitar patch from NI Kontakt to get a similar sound, then programming two different upper layers to subtly differentiate the part’s verse, pre‑chorus and chorus voicings. (I also reused the region‑specific low‑pass filtering dodge I’d tried on the drums, restricting the guitar’s upper spectrum early in the song to improve the long‑term dynamics.) The programmed bass part benefited from some layering too, with an added sub‑bass synth lending the line extra power for the later choruses and during the second half of the guitar solo.

One way of apparently introducing variation into a repeating part is to subtly layer a similar‑sounding MIDI instrument alongside. In this remix, for example, Mike used a Jazz Guitar patch from Native Instruments’ Kontakt to extend the upper harmony voicing of the song’s main echoey guitar loop, to suit different sections of the arrangement.

You have to be careful when adding extra parts at mixdown like this, because few musicians like to feel that you’re tampering with the essential musical material. So it’s wise to keep such contributions in the ‘subtle to subliminal’ range. But if you feel that a section of the arrangement needs something a bit more ostentatious, you can reduce the risk of a negative response if you create that new element by remodelling some existing recorded track, perhaps from a different section of the song. For example, I’d jettisoned a piano special‑effect track while whittling down the song’s introduction, but later I was able to use this as a ‘new’ atmospheric element to differentiate the second verse and pre‑chorus from the first.

This trick helped with the song’s second chorus too. You see, the third chorus had been bolstered with heavily distorted electric guitars, but there was no real sonic progression between choruses one and two. Luckily, Trevor had recorded DI signals for those parts, so I could generate less heavily...