148. Mix Rescue – What To Tackle First

You walk in and there's a dumpster fire, if you will, going on.

Or I've had it where I've been there myself.

you know, doing the rehearsal and I feel like I'm in a dumpster fire because my mix just isn't coming together that morning or, you know, there's just multiple things going on.

And for whatever reason, that morning isn't happening.

So, you know, when you're in that situation or you walk into that situation, what do you do? Yeah,

it can be...

Difficult to pin down exactly what's most important.

Often I'll do this even as an exercise with groups that I'm training.

So I'll build a mix, it's fine.

And then I'll scramble it all up and make a bunch of mistakes that I've seen over the years of people doing weird stuff.

You're like, okay, go.

Like, where do you fix stuff? So the first thing that I focus on is absolutely the vocals, right? If the vocals can't be heard clearly, if they're not able to be understood and sung along with, really nothing else matters in our mix, right? Even if we brought it down to acapella, we could do that, right? And there are churches that still have acapella services, even with all the technology that's available, they might still do that.

And that's totally fine.

We have to get the vocals sounding right.

So what am I checking when I'm finding vocals that are either, they're just not right.

They're not clear.

They're not present.

They're not in front of everything else.

I often listen first for what might be burying the vocals, right? What's out in front of the vocals.

And I am ruthless, right? I will turn whatever it is down.

I don't care how precious it is to somebody or like, oh, this instrument has to be out in front.

And we'd be like, well, not that far out in front.

I'll pull stuff down just so that I can get a clear picture of what's going on with the vocals.

You know, if it's an emergency situation and the service has started, right, this is rarer.

But, you know, even if the service is going and it was like there was just some audio catastrophe, could have been, you know, just nobody knew what they were doing.