First Principles

← Back to all posts

“For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.”
— Aristotle, Physics

In music production, most of our ideas are copied from somebody else's ideas.

We buy a sample pack from a YouTube video and call it our sound.

First principles means going back to what's true and building it up from there.

The Starting Point

Ask a producer why there are three compressors on the lead vocal track, and the answer often includes someone's name.

(Famous mix engineer) used that signal chain, so I use it too.

That's reasoning by analogy, and it's how most of us learned.

It works, until the song in front of us isn't the song the famous mixer was mixing.

The Invitation

First principles asks us a smaller question: What's true about this sound?

A sound has a level, a tone, a length, a place in the stereo field, and a phase relationship with everything around it.

Every plugin we own changes one or more of those five things.

Name the thing you want to change before you reach for anything.

The Test

Try it on the kick.

Turn off every plugin on the channel, and listen to the raw sound first.

Then say what's wrong with it in plain terms: too quiet, too dull, too long, too wide, or fighting the bass.

The answer is usually one move, but our chains were often built to solve five problems the kick didn't even have in the first place.

The Guidepost

Phase is the principle we skip most often.

Two mics on one snare drum "hear" the hit at slightly different times, and the low end cancels out when they're added together.

Flip the polarity on the bottom mic, and keep whichever option has the most low end (bass and low mids).

Then press Mono, and check that the low end is still there.

If it's not, you'll need to move (or nudge) the bottom mic.

The Change

Pick one channel in your current project, and strip it back to nothing.

Rebuild it one move at a time, and write down what each move changes: level, tone, length, width or phase.

If you can't name what a plugin changed, take it out.

Pro Tip: Put Utility (Ableton Live) or MUtility (any DAW) first on every channel, so gain, polarity, and Mono are all one click away.

The Return

Copying a great mixer's chain is how most of us start, and it's a fine way to start.

But that chain was built for their song, their room and their ears.

The principles underneath it are the part that transfers to our own music.

Once we learn those, every preset becomes something we can read instead of something we have to trust.

During your next mix, instead of asking: “What chain does everyone use on this?”

Ask: “What's actually true about this sound?”

Free Ableton Live Course and Music Production Resources

Song of the Week 🎧

Bobby McFerrin — "Don’t Worry, Be Happy"

Listen for all of the instruments on this one. Spoiler: There aren't any.

Bobby McFerrin recorded this song at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley in 1988, with producer Linda Goldstein, on eight tracks. He built the bass line first, slapping his chest as he sang it, then stacked the harmonies, then sang the lead. It became the first a cappella song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and it won Song of the Year and Record of the Year at the Grammys.

A great song. Bass, rhythm, harmony and melody, all built from one sound source: a human voice.

YouTube Wisdom of the Week 📚

You Don't Have To Be a Rocket Scientist To Think Like One (Ozan Varol, The Playbook)

Think Like a Rocket Scientist — Ozan Varol

Varol worked on the operations team for NASA's 2003 Mars rovers before he became a law professor and wrote this book. He argues that rocket science is a way of thinking, not just a job title: question the assumption, strip the problem down to what's known, and reason up from there. In a mix, that's the difference between loading a preset and having an intentional reason for every move.

Plugin of the Week 🔌

Utility (Ableton)

The most boring device in Live, and the one that tells the truth. It flips the polarity on the left or right side, narrows the width, sums to Mono, and has a Bass Mono switch that keeps everything below the frequency you choose in the middle. Put it last on your master, and press Mono while the chorus plays. A/B it against the stereo mix, and hear what disappears.