Mix Masters: Pop Vocals with Phil Tan

“Finding the right EQ or compressor is a bit like finding the right mic for recording. That LA-2A you used and worked great on the last song may not seem right on this one, for any number of reasons, the tempo and key of the song, for example. I don’t have specific settings I use on everything, unfortunately. I wish I did: everything would go so much quicker! Instead, every setting in every mix is done on a case-by-case basis. I basically just adjust things until I think it feels good. For some of the less experienced, consulting a frequency chart might not be a bad idea. Analysers can help too, when trying to identify problem areas.

“Mixers sit for hours every day in a room, and like to try new things, and with Diamonds, I tried the VintageMaker summing box. It has 16 inputs, and I sent stereo pairs of drums, music, vocals and effects returns to the VintageMaker from my Mitch Berger-modified Avid 192 I/O. The VintageMaker is passive and has no sound of its own, so to bring it up to line level it needs to be sent through a stereo mic pre, which also adds some character. In this case I used my two Neve 1079s, which went into my Manley limiter. From there the stereo mix went back in ProTools, coming up on Track 3, on which I had the Waves S1 Stereo Imager to create a bit more space and width for the image, and the Metric Halo ChannelStrip.

“The EQ1B is the ProTools EQ, which just acts as a high-pass filter, taking out some messy rumble in the low end. I also had the Waves SSL Channel.”

“The tracks at the bottom of the session are all vocal effects tracks, with a Waves Rverb, ProTools Extra Long Delay II, Waves MetaFlanger, and two different Doublers, one acting more like a micro-pitch shifter. Their aim was to fatten the vocal up a little bit.”

“Compression (in the conventional sense) lowers the loud parts and brings up the quiet parts, so if someone is singing their heart out and the signal is overcompressed, what the performer is trying to communicate emotionally may not come across. When some of the less desirable parts are really loud (breaths, ess’s, eff’s etc.) it’s not a bad idea to check or re-tweak your settings.

“I shy away from using too much compression on my tracks in general. The whole loudness war issue is a big issue, and I find myself constantly fighting the rough mixes of the songs that I mix. What often happens is that rough mixes are done late at night, after a day’s work, and the engineer brickwalls it and calls it a day. But often people get used to hearing things in that way, and many record company executives think that something that’s less loud is less good, whereas in fact it can be better, because there’s space in the track and it can breathe properly. The problem for me is that I have to make sure that whatever I turn in is at least as loud as the rough mix, or maybe a little hotter.

“I prefer not to handcuff the mastering engineer by giving him something that’s so loud that he can’t do anything with it. I tend to send a version that’s anything from 5-7dB quieter, giving him headroom to be able to do his thing. This can vary per genre, and if it’s more of a clubby song where the low end needs to be really powerful, a limiter is part of the sound. I still try to make sure that the mix does not fall apart without the limiter, and that the balances are intact and the different parts of the song are doing their jobs, and the limiter basically enhances everything. In the case of Diamonds, I sent both versions to the mastering engineer, Chris Gehringer, who mastered the entire Unapologetic album, so he could do whatever he needed to do to make sure it fit in with the rest of the album.”