The Jan Diaries — Production Processes: The Mix

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 27 October 2021

The second instalment of the studio series picks up where the recording column left off, and this time Jan Kinčl hands most of the talking to someone else. Igor Fabris — musician, producer and engineer, now running Fabris Audio in Berlin after years at AVID in Zagreb, with more than thirty years behind him — supplies the definitions, the workflow and the best line in the piece. The topic came in from a reader, Martina, and at ten minutes it is the longest entry in the series.

What the piece covers

A mix, in Fabris’ definition, is the act of combining many separate channels — the individual instruments — into a finished track, usually delivered as a single stereo file. The principle is coherence: everything that was recorded has to become one thing that sounds good. His explanatory metaphor is a house: the composition is the blueprint, the recording is the foundations and load-bearing walls, the mix is the carpentry, stairs, wiring and plumbing that let the building function, and mastering is the paint, handles, taps and furniture that make it habitable. Which sets up the argument the column is really built around. For twenty years there has been a working assumption that the mastering engineer will magically repair a bad mix, and Fabris rejects it outright: a good mix needs only a nudge from a hundred to a hundred and five per cent, while a bad one cannot be saved.

The practical core is a seven-step sequence, laid out plainly. Preparation and a listen through every channel with the session organised logically; gain staging to set the basic volume relationships before any processing; EQ, cutting the frequencies that damage an instrument’s character and lifting the ones that let it read, always judged in context rather than in isolation; compression to control dynamic range, plus modulation to shape tone and texture; effects — reverb, delay, echo, chorus, phaser, flanger — to build a three-dimensional space and place each sound in it; volume automation, which done well makes a song breathe; and a final check before mastering. Fabris adds that the ideal case never occurs, since most authors have no clear picture of their own work, and quotes the trade aphorism that a mix is never finished, only abandoned.

The part that stayed

What lifts the piece above a procedure list is the section on conditions and people. Equipment matters less than developed hearing, monitoring faithful enough to be trusted, and an acoustically treated room — an untreated one produces a false picture of the sound and every misunderstanding downstream follows from it. The human part is patience, knowledge and persistence, which Fabris renders as quiet swearing and banging your head on the desk. He is blunt about the wider context too: set today’s budgets against the 1970s, when whole ensembles of musicians, engineers and producers worked on one album, and the fall in investment is obvious — which feeds a spiral of falling quality. Asked why he still does it, his answer is disarming: because he loves being patted on the shoulder.