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The Mix Review Justin Timberlake ft. Chris Stapleton

French Montana
Commercial Productions Analysed Daniil Trifonov
Classic Mix: Bruce Springsteen ‘Dancing In The
Media > Music Dark’ (1984)
track
By Mike Senior Published July 2018

Brush up on your listening skills, as we dissect some hits from a recording Readers' Ads
and production perspective.
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Justin Timberlake ft. Chris Stapleton
‘Say Something’ On the same subject
As his fans become savvier about backroom The Mix Review
production tricks, how can Justin Timberlake December 2018
convince them he’s not just a fashionable The Mix Review
November 2018
mediocrity with a big budget for studio fakery?
The Mix Review 0918
I know: join forces with more-credible-than-
September 2018
thou roots artist Chris Stapleton, hire warts-
The Mix Review
and-all music documentary purveyors La August 2018
Blogothéque, and do an ambitiously The Mix Review
choreographed ‘live in a single take’ music June 2018
video! Well, you’ll forgive me if I forego the
widespread ‘OMG how amazing they did it all Latest Videos
live’ reaction, because a fundamental attribute of live performance is that there’s no safety net,
and nowhere to hide if you goof or your tuning/timing is wayward. Judging by the setup
described in SOS April 2018’s ‘Inside Track’ feature, I don’t think there was actually any such
jeopardy at all. Let me explain...

The bass, Rhodes piano, and both ‘lead’ acoustic guitars were DI’d. Elliot Ives’s guitar is seen
being recorded in a separate room (with a door), and none of the mics inside the upright piano
(with the lid closed), in the bells of the horns (as shown in the article), and right by the kick and
snare would have picked up much spill either. The article’s Pro Tools screenshots reveal that
the drum overhead channel is mostly muted, apart from infrequent cymbal hits. All the lead
and backing vocals were close-miked with lavaliers, and the lack of mechanical noise from the
iZotope RX7 - AES 2018
vintage elevator during Timberlake’s rst verse suggests those were pretty e ective at keeping
1 month 2 weeks ago.
spill levels low — so I doubt either lead singer picked up much spill from anything other than
the drums and their own guitars. As for the ambient and choir mics, heaven knows how much
of those we’re actually hearing, given all the reverbs on display in the Pro Tools mix project and
the engineers’ own admission that they did choir-only overdubs that were “really helpful later
during mixing”.

In short, I reckon you could have grid-edited the band and Melodyned the living daylights out of
all the vocals without tremendous di culty. Even the spill on the vocals wouldn’t have been
very problematic, because the unpitched and di use nature of drum ambience wouldn’t be
very revealing of pitch/timing-shift artifacts, while the song’s multi-layered acoustic-guitar
texture would disguise any phasey-sounding guitar spill. While it’s not impossible that this
soundtrack is a truly unvarnished live performance, personally I think it’s pretty long odds, Waves Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain - AES 2018
given the more wayward tuning of Timberlake’s live performance on The Tonight Show, for 1 month 2 weeks ago.
instance. And once that seed of suspicion is sown, who’s to say that the engineers didn’t comp
parts between their six takes? Or even just re-record everything (except the choir overdubs) in
the studio and sync things back up with ADR software? Sure, no-one mentioned anything of the
sort, but long-time readers who recall our coverage of Cher’s ‘Believe’ back in SOS February
1999 will know that producers aren’t always entirely frank about corrective editing as regards
their highest-pro le clients.

So if you strip out the credibility of the video’s central audio conceit, you’re basically left with
two middle-aged guitar-strummers strolling around and riding lifts. Big hairy deal! Hell, in
purely visual terms, I’m more impressed by the Spice Girls’ one-take wonder for ‘Wannabe’...
Mike Senior
French Montana Audio Technica Drum Packs - AES 2018
1 month 2 weeks ago.

‘Unforgettable’

House artists have been pulsing the envelopes

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of sustained synth sounds, sampled
ambiences, and e ects returns in a quarter-
note pattern for such a long time now, but it
surprises me how seldom I hear the related
trick that appears at the outset of this
production (and frequently after that too): the
whole-note envelope ramp. It’s particularly
e ective, in fact, when it’s set alongside the
traditional quarter-note variety from 0:49,
because together they create a sense of
internal rhythmic momentum both per bar and
per beat. What is a little unusual, though, is
that the whole-note envelope (which sounds
like a  lter envelope) resets a fraction before
the downbeat of each bar, and I wonder
whether the little anticipatory lter-sweep ‘blip’
slightly undermines the groove, most noticeably during the stripped-back sections at 0:11 and
1:48. Mike Senior

Daniil Trifonov
Franz Liszt’s ‘Grandes Études De Paganini’

Daniil Trifonov’s tremendous recording of

Liszt’s complete concert études was a worthy
winner of this year’s Best Classical Instrumental
Solo Grammy. (I was, rather unwisely in
retrospect, drinking a glass of milk while
listening to his astonishing rendition of
‘Gnomenriegen’; there’s a QWERTY-keyboard
cleaning job I never want to have to do again...)
One of the crucial issues for any classical
recording is the balance between the direct
and reverberant sound, something that’s
enormously ticklish to manage with just one
pair of mics, so most recordists therefore opt
to use multiple mic pairs at di erent distances
to a ord some mixdown control over the
depth perspective. This isn’t just an arse-saving
measure, though, because it allows you to
adapt the degree of close detail and reverberant expansiveness to suit changes in the music,
which is something I think really pays dividends in this production.

As it happens, the CD’s booklet and trailer video both clearly show the multi-mic system they
used, comprising three small-diaphragm pairs that I’d eyeball as being roughly 2m, 5m, and
10m from the hammers respectively. (There’s also a large-diaphragm mic hovering around the
tail of the instrument, presumably for an alternative tonal perspective.) If you use your DAW to
skip around the timeline of, say, the nal A-minor étude, I think you can hear the mix engineer
rebalancing those mics in response to the contrasting demands of the Theme and its 11
Variations. To my ears, Variations 1 and 4 feel appreciably more present and detailed, for
instance, with less room ambience, better to allow their delicate rhythmic intricacies to shine
through, whereas the sound becomes more open and resonant for the grandiose chordal
sweeps of the closing Variation 11. The transition between Variations 4 and 5 is also interesting,
given that they’re both at a similar dynamic level, because it feels to me as if Trifonov can’t be
solely responsible for the softer tone and additional sustain of the latter.

Where the recording method pays o most handsomely for me, though, is during Variation 6,
where the music’s sheer machine-gun speed and chordal density usually renders it a bit of
a mush in most real-world concert situations, to be honest, no matter how clear the player’s
articulation. Here, the ambience manages to maintain impressive warmth and width, but with
every staccato clear as a bell and the sporadic action of the sustain pedal thrown into dramatic
relief.

Another intriguing aspect of the recording setup is that the left and right ‘close mics’ are each
actually two separate mics taped together in a vertically aligned bundle. None of the pictures
show enough detail to identify the mics exactly, but they do look like they’re from the same
manufacturer, so I wonder whether they’re some implementation of the Straus Paket (named
after recording engineer Volker Straus), whereby you mix the signals of coincident cardioid and
omni capsules to generate a variable sub-cardioid response. Again, this would potentially
provide further post-production control over the depth perspective, so I could see the appeal.
Mike Senior

Classic Mix: Bruce Springsteen ‘Dancing In The Dark’ (1984)

This song has so comprehensively
wormed its way into the collective
unconscious that it’s hard to hear it
without preconceptions, but at face value
that drum sound is pretty strange. For
a start, the combination of super-dry
kick, densely ambient snare, and
di usely distant hi-hat bear no relation
to any kind of acoustic reality. In
addition, the hyper-consistent kick and
snare hits add a de nite drum-machine
character to the part. I suspect they’re
both triggered samples, in fact, given the
‘AMS Kick’ and ‘AMS Sn’ track-sheet
annotations for the same album’s ‘Born
In The USA’, as shown in SOS March
2010's Classic Tracks feature. (The AMS
DMX 15-80s was one of the rst devices widely used for drum-sample triggering.) The
scarcity of cymbal hits is also strange for what is ostensibly a rock song, and the two we
do get (at 1:50 and 2:42) are much louder and more forward-sounding than the hi-hat.

Looking at the studio setup from that Classic Tracks article, I  nd it fascinating how the
received wisdom of the time was to isolate all the musicians from each other acoustically,
thereby removing any shared ambience, only to add masses of arti cial reverb at
mixdown to regenerate an acoustic connection! Of course, this rather roundabout
process did produce sounds that were new and ear-catching at the time — and there’s
no arguing with that — but now that the bou ant qui s of the ’80s are long de ated, it
does seem rather too much like hard work to me.

The small-speaker translation is worthy of admiration, though; there’s no denying the

clarity with which the song’s main musical elements would have driven through a mono
AM radio. The kick’s kept present in the mix by its perky upper mid-range, for example,
and the bass guitar line can be easily traced via the zzy synth that’s surreptitiously
doubling it. The snare is, of course, as solid as you’d expect of a sample, while The Boss
himself has clearly been expertly automated to keep softer low-register phrases such as
“hey there baby” (0:33) pinned into the same mix position as the upper-register bawling
on “I’m just about starving tonight” (2:14).

On a musical level, despite the song’s apparent simplicity, it pulls a neat little harmonic
trick. The melodic backbone of the song, as featured in the opening synth ri and much
of the vocal line, appears over three di erent harmonic backings. First you get it over a B
pedal note, with alternating Bm and G#m chords, then the bass picks out the root notes
of those chords for the second half of the prechorus (0:33-0:38), and for the title hook
(0:45-0:51) we get E and C#m chords instead.

In common with most ’80s productions, the original music video is good for a giggle,
featuring as it does a pre-Friends Courteney Cox. I was also surprised to learn that the
director was Brian De Palma, better known for rather less wholesome fare such as Carrie
and Scarface. Perhaps Springsteen’s horrifying dancing drew him to the project...
Mike Senior

Published July 2018

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