“If you confuse, you'll lose.”
— Donald Miller
Donald Miller says that if you confuse, you lose.
In music production, if a track gets boring eleven seconds in, people will simply move on to the next one.
If we can't figure out what we are supposed to be listening to, we are outta here...fast!
The Starting Point
Ask a producer what their song is about and we give a tour of the session instead of an answer.
We start with the mood, move on to the sidechain, and finish somewhere around which compressor was on the bus.
Ninety seconds later nobody knows what the song is actually for.
We had the answer the whole time. We just never picked one.
The Invitation
Write one sentence before we open the session.
Skip the genre, skip the gear, and write down what the song does to a person.
Something like: this one is about missing somebody we're not allowed to call.
It looks soft on paper. It will make about forty decisions for us by Friday.
The Test
Play the mix for somebody who doesn't make music and ask them what the most important thing they're hearing is.
If they pause before answering, the pause is the note.
Most muddy mixes have a decision problem rather than a frequency problem.
Nobody picked a winner, so now the EQ has to referee a fight the arrangement started.
The Guidepost
Clarity gets treated like something we add at the end, which is why we go shopping for it.
It's really a hundred small refusals stacked on top of each other.
Every cut says this matters less than that, and every fader move is an argument about priority.
A mix where nothing got refused sounds exactly like what it is.
The Change
Write the sentence first and the session gets shorter, and not because we suddenly work faster.
We stop auditioning options we were never going to keep.
That is most of what a long session actually is.
The Return
Nobody is going to lean in and work out what we meant.
They have a thumb and forty million other songs, and they always have.
Say the thing, then get out of its way.
That second part is the hard one, because getting out of the way usually means deleting something we were proud of.
Before your next session, don’t ask:
“Does this sound good?”
Ask:
“Is it obvious what I want you to hear?”
Become A Music Production Ninja
Song of the Week 🎧
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Rick Rubin handed a man in his seventies a Nine Inch Nails song and told him to sing it. On paper that is a terrible idea. Trent Reznor has said it felt like watching someone else kiss his girlfriend, and then he saw the video and said the song wasn't his anymore.
Play both versions back to back. Same words. Reznor buries his in noise, which is exactly right for what he was saying at the time. Cash has a piano, a guitar, and a voice that is running out of road. Nothing to hide behind and nothing hiding.
One lyric, two men, and the clearer one wins by a mile. That's this whole issue in four minutes.
YouTube Wisdom of the Week đź“š
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How to clarify your message so people listen | Donald Miller | TEDxNashville
Building a StoryBrand — Donald Miller
The one that matters for us is his last point: remove noise so the message can be understood in seconds. He's talking about a website. It's the same job as a mix.
Plugin of the Week 🔌
Sonnox built this one around the picture rather than the curve. It shows the other tracks sitting behind the one you're working on, which turns “this sounds muddy” into “these two are in the same place.” You can't be clear about something you can't see.
Free Plugin of the Week 🆓
A free spectrum analyzer. You can't be clear about what you can't see. Put it on the two tracks you think are fighting and look at where they overlap. It's usually 200–400Hz, and it's usually everything.
Unsolicited life advice for music makers
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