Only we know exactly what took place. It was a kind of Fight Club agreement: we were not allowed to talk about what took place in the studio. The reason was that some of the tracks we got to hear had not yet been released. And some of the plugins we were shown were still in beta.
So before we walked into the studio, we left our cell phones in the lounge.
Last week I spent five days at Rue Boyer Studios in Paris (part of Mix With The Masters). I took a master class in music mixing with Tchad Blake. Our company consisted of 22 music makers who were from France, Belgium, United Kingdom, Austria, Spain, Brazil and America.
The Sub
In Paris, the penny dropped on how modern music should sound.
Although Tchad hails from the analog era, he has long since had both feet in the modern computer age. He fully exploits the possibilities of digital technology. Uses many plugins to add character, mute, cut and paste, when needed.
Tchad loves deep low end, the sub. He loves hip-hop and brought this concept to pop/rock music. The bass drum track drives a sample that provides the sub.
His mixes sound wide. In the past, he often used the ‘Buenos Notches’ preset of the famous Eventide H3000 effects processor to move the sound slowly through the soundstage. You can also accomplish that with a slow flanger, panner, or something similar.
He also uses extreme panning, one channel completely on the left, the other on the right. He does this because too much is happening in the middle range, after all, the vocals, bass, and bass drum are there too. So Tchad looks for ways to create space.
He was never a fan of reverb in the 80-90s. Especially because his colleague Bob Clearmountain was so good at it. Bob was sometimes the mixing engineer of a production for which Tchad was the recording engineer, such as Woodface by Crowded House.
This caused Tchad to look in a different direction. So he started using distortion as a kind of reverb. After all, distortion gives sustain to the sound.
Today he does use reverb but still uses a lot of distortion as well to color the tone and adjust the depth and length of the sound.
Get to work!
Being in the studio with Tchad every day from 10 in the morning until 7 at night and seeing and hearing him do his stuff made an unlikely impression on me. Apart from the top sound he brought into my life, Tchad also turned out to be a very sweet guy. My fellow students also impressed me greatly with the great music they had brought and their passion for music. A bond was formed that I hope will last into the future.
Tchad retuned my ears and inspired me to get creative with mixing. Thus a new little plan was born….