The 7 Virtues of Great Mixers

The SonicScoop Podcast | Mixing, Mastering, Audio Engineering and Music Production

In this episode, platinum mastering engineer Justin Colletti outlines seven specific virtues that define great mixing engineers. He moves be

Key takeaways

• Right Ordering (Discernment) requires prioritizing major elements like vocals over secondary details like percussion or tambourine.
• The 'Zoominess' virtue involves toggling between floodlight consciousness for the big picture and spotlight consciousness for technical micro-details.

Main topics

• Right Ordering and Prioritization
• Zoominess: Floodlight vs. Spotlight Consciousness

Notable quotes

The number one job of a mixer and the number one quality of a mixer is prioritization, is right ordering, is getting things in the right order.

Conclusion

This episode provides a philosophical framework for engineers to move

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello, hello, it is Justin Coletti of Sonic Scoop. Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of the Sonic Scoop podcast. And today, we are going over the seven virtues of every great mixer. I have been, as you probably know, studying the best mixing engineers on the planet for lo the last couple of decades now, working professionally in audio for the past couple of decades. I'm a platinum mastering engineer, and I've worked with people at all levels of their career. great mixers doing great mixes to very new neophyte mixers who are kind of just figuring it all out. And wherever you fall in there, there are seven qualities, seven virtues that I think you can develop. And if you work on developing these, you will have something in common with the best mixers because these are the qualities I see in all of them. We've done this before from like the flip side of it where we did the seven deadly sins of mixing and in the first one of those I did I just kind of pointed out the most common things that are like wrong and bad in most mixes that need mix revisions when they get to the mastering stage. But then enough people were interested in me doing an episode on like the actual seven deadly sins. We went through all of them. Are they lust, gluttony? Speaker 1 (1:13) avarice. We went through all of those. We did a whole episode about that, and that one was even more popular. It's actually one of my favorite episodes. But today we're not doing like the seven classical virtues for anyone who's interested. What are they? Temperance, fortitude, hope, charity. Man, I should have prepared for this, right? We're not doing that. We're not doing all of the seven classical virtues. We're doing seven specific virtues that are specific to mixing. And they're going to include ones you've never heard of before. like zoominess. Yes, some of these are entirely made-up words. However, they speak to very true concepts and ideas that you're immediately going to recognize and immediately figure out how you can start cultivating in your own work. Shout out to all of you who are joining me for the live stream premiere. Let me know if everything sounds good and is looking good. I think on my last live stream, people told me there was a little bit of a clicking. There might have been a clocking issue. or a sync issue of some kind. So I hope that's not happening today. So yo to all of you who are joining me for the live. Isomatic, good to have you here. Alex, good to have you here. Alpha, good to have you here. So I'll be taking your chats as we go along. All right, without any further ado, let's get right into it with the very first virtue that I want you to think about cultivating. And that is the most important virtue. We're gonna start with the first one, which is right ordering, also known as... Discernment. Right ordering. What does this mean? This is going to have the most dry name out of all of them. I couldn't think of something super fancy sounding for this one, but it is the most important. And that's why I put it first. Because the number one job of a mixer is not balancing everything against each other so they can be equally loud at all times. No, the number one job of a mixer and the number one quality of a mixer is prioritization, is right ordering, is getting things in the right order. Speaker 1 (3:11) When I say right order, I don't just mean right order of process, although I think there is a right order of process. You should work on bigger things before you start obsessing about smaller things. And we all do this backwards a lot of the time. We'll zoom in and hyper-focus on a little bitty sound. Maybe we're doing some really tight notch filtering with an EQ that has almost no impact on the mix when we haven't looked at the bigger things. And that is absolutely one of the parts of right ordering is getting things like in the right order. Do the most important things first and then also do the less important things second. But the other big thing when it comes to the actual mix itself, this idea of right ordering, is it's not about everything in the mix being balanced at all times. It's about getting things in the mix in the right order of priority. And this is one of the... biggest most foundational problems in mixing that causes also tension between engineers producers and artists is having the wrong vision about the right order if the most important elements in a certain musical section are vocals and a really interesting bass line But you're busy making the kick and the tambourine the loudest things in the track because you think they're cool and that you can impress people with a big kick sound and a sparkly tambourine sound. You're doing it wrong because you haven't put things in their proper order. The most important number one thing, better than having a pleasant even balance. is getting things in the right order. So in the actual mix itself, this is number one. I harp on this all the time. I have this theory around this called tier theory. I explain it in almost every episode I do because it's super important. You can only have one or two elements in your A tier, one or two elements in your B tier, and then everything else is in the C tier in the mix. And we can talk about tricks to make it seem like there's lots of different elements that are in the A tier, like things take turns with each other. And we can puzzle piece things together to get... things more heard, but this is super important. Right ordering. Also right ordering in the process. I've talked about this a bunch recently in some recent episodes, focusing on the big before you focus on the small. But there's also another place for right ordering. Right ordering your own mindset about what's important when it comes to mixing. Are you obsessed about buying more plugins? You should have some plugins. You should have some cool ones. You should have some fun ones. You should have some not stock plugins. But are you spending a bunch of money on plugins before you've spent money on good monitoring? Before you've spent money on, if you don't have much to spend on monitoring, a good $400 pair of open back planar magnetic headphones that are going to allow you to get professional results in a not well-treated room. Check out my list of those kinds of things. Or a $300 pair of the Slate VSX headphones. Something like that is going to have a way bigger impact than are you going to like A to D conversion and obsessing about like the quality of your D to A converter and your headphone amp before you actually have just like good headphones? Now, if you have a little bit more to spend, well-treated room with good studio monitors is way more important. But even more important than any of the gear, you can learn to do great mixes on a $79 pair of headphones if you put in the time to learning those headphones. So are you prioritizing man-hours, reps of mixing over the tools? Speaker 1 (6:49) Because I'll tell you, you get someone tons of reps of listening to great records and trying to make great sounding records on super cheap $79 headphones, and they will outperform dramatically someone who's not spending enough time on a much better system. Speaker 1 (7:07) Ideally, you get both of those things right. But you need right ordering when it comes to what are the most important things for your studio? What are the most important things in your life? What are the most important things in the mix? What are the most important things to do first? And then the things that you can put off for later in your actual process. I have full episodes about all that stuff. And dude, honestly, just this one thing could be a full episode. I could stop here at seven minutes and... We could be done and that's how most channels would do it, but I don't. So we're going to keep going deeper and hopefully better as we go along because we're going to our next big principle, which is zoominess. I told you it was coming. This virtue of zoominess. This is the virtue of being able to zoom out and to zoom in. You have two types of consciousness. You have what I've heard described to me as the floodlight consciousness and a spotlight consciousness. What's a floodlight? When it's dark outside, a floodlight illuminates everything around. It's a very wide casting light allowing you to see a lot of stuff. A spotlight is very different. A spotlight doesn't illuminate everything. It targets, it focuses in, and illuminates very distinctly one thing. And we have these two different modes we can be in. For instance, you and me are having a conversation while you're driving a car. If you don't drive, think of riding a bicycle. We're having a conversation, you're riding a bicycle, okay? I'm going with car because I'm in America and that's how we do. Anyway, you are driving a car and I'm sitting next to you in the passenger seat and we're having a conversation, me and you. And you're talking to me and you're telling me a very detailed story. You are using your floodlight consciousness to drive. Speaker 1 (9:04) Your floodlight consciousness is observing everything on the road, noticing all the stuff that's happening without even necessarily having it register in your conscious mind. Until something startling comes up, a deer runs in front and all of a sudden you need to make a decision. Do I stop? Do I turn? And then maybe it's in your conscious consciousness. Speaker 1 (9:24) your conscious consciousness. It comes into your spotlight consciousness for a moment, but mostly floodlight consciousness is what's allowing you to drive the car. You're not thinking actively about how hard to push down on the pedal with your right foot or exactly how much to steer. You're just doing that. And you're not thinking about every little thing that you're seeing on the road. You're generally observing and anything important jumps out at you. But then your spotlight consciousness is totally keyed in on the conversation that you're having with me and the details of what I'm saying and the details of what you're saying back to me. That's floodlight versus spotlight consciousness. Speaker 1 (10:04) And you need to be able to do this kind of thing where you can go from your floodlight and putting your energy into that of softening your mind and taking everything in without too much focusing on any one thing and sometimes getting really granular and putting on the spotlight and examining one thing very closely. Speaker 1 (10:25) I think an even better analogy here for what happens in the mix when we're doing good work is zooming out and zooming in. We zoom out into floodlight consciousness where we hear everything without focusing on individual elements and obsessing about what we need to do to any one little thing. No, we're having the actual music impact us as an overall whole. We're allowed to be objective about what we're hearing. We're allowing ourselves not to touch anything, not to micromanage any one sound or try to impose our will on the music. We're just actually really listening and observing. And then we might need to zoom in, zoom way in. Every once in a while, we need to get the microscope out. There's a weird click that's happening or something like that. We need to put our conscious mind and become more technical. Maybe we need to zoom into a track and focus on just that track and we EQ that track and think about what it's doing to just that track. Or think about what's doing to neighboring tracks. Maybe we need to put in solo for a minute to make sure we're in the right place. But hopefully we don't spend a lot of time in solo. We spend the time, most of our time, zoomed out enough that we see the big picture, but we can focus on the thing that we're focused on. But then we need to get out of that microscopic mindset and that zoomed in mindset. And we need to spend a lot