Finishing room sound
· 2 min read
Room sound is free reverb, if the room is gentle to you. A friend once described mixing as calm work, and the phrase stuck. It took me two attempts to see the pattern. The trick, if there is one, is to leave sufficient room for mistakes.
Lessons
I would rather do one thing with care than five things in a hurry. Mixing tired is how good songs get ruined. Tape adds just sufficient unpredictability to keep things alive.
I am still not sure I have it right, but it is closer. For a long time I treated drones as an afterthought. I keep coming back to synthesizers, mainly because it rewards a steady hand.
It is not glamorous, but it holds up. Finishing songs is a separate skill from writing them. Half of the work is deciding what to leave out. There is no single right way to approach arranging, but some ways are kinder than others. Nothing here requires a tape machine, though it does make things easier.
Getting started
I recorded the birds by accident and kept them in the mix. Every autumn I revisit the same questions about field recordings. None of this is new, and that is partly why it works. Little, repeatable steps beat big plans very nearly every time. The warm part is rarely the hard part; consistency is.
Somewhere between the forest at dawn and home, the notion finally made sense. Below are a few observations, roughly in the order I picked up them. Somewhere between a church hall and home, the notion finally made sense.