The Mastering Engineer's Handbook 4th Edition

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Written with special emphasis on today's technology and the evolving marketplace, The Recording Engineer's Handbook Fourth Edition includes a complete overview of recording as it's done by most musicians and producers today in their home studios. I’ll have listened to vocal and the background vocals and know exactly where they are, but I’ll get the band to work without the vocals first, which I know a lot of people don’t think is a good idea. To get a tight sound on the drums and to assure no leaking into the brass or strings’ mics, I’ll set the drums up in the drum booth.

Also, because I mix on a console there’s the whole process of laying out the outputs of Pro Tools to see where everything is going to come up on the console. It doesn’t always have to be timed to the track; sometimes it can go in the hole so you can hear it. Sometimes some mids need to be cut or other frequencies need to be added, but regardless what you add or subtract, Clarity is what you aim for. Producer/engineer Bobby Owsinski is one of the best selling authors in the music industry with 24 books that are now staples in audio recording, music, and music business programs in colleges around the world, including the Deconstructed Hits series, Social Media Promotion For Musicians, The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, The Music Business Advice Book, and more. I taught myself how to edit and all this other stuff, but in their heads I wasn’t ready to be an engineer because I was still just a kid in their eyes.Mixes That Sound Distant And Are Devoid Of Any Feeling Of Intimacy – The mix sounds distant because too much reverb or overuse of other effects. Artists like Van Morrison were more album oriented so what they did was more oriented towards album radio, so it would be hard for me to determine what was a huge hit singles-wise. We used to listen to records to get ideas or emulate, but you were always working the whole time you were there. The book sometimes goes into extreme details to help the reader get the best sound out of the snare drum, but then when it comes to the piano, it tells you nothing more than that with this and this EQ, you can get a similar sound as Elton John.

And most importantly, you can tell that the author put a lot of thought into how the book would be made. I do admire what can be done in Protools, but if there’s something that wrong, you should have done another take and maybe chop things together.

You want to sound contemporary and current but you can’t know what that is unless you listen to the records that the audience is digging at the moment.

Elliot Scheiner: Oddly enough, I’ve been tracking lately but I’d have to say that overall the majority of my work is mixing. Your superpower is the ability to engage deeply, which requires staying flexible and continuously re-calibrating where and how your attention is spent.

In fact, there are some things that I mixed in the box that I listen to now and go, “Wow, that sounds really good. I give interns your book and I say, “Here, read this and find out how records are REALLY mixed in the REAL world”, and then they start to blossom. Leadership without management: the what, the how, the tools, and how to measure success as a Principal+ engineer. I loved Jimmy Hendrix at that point more than anything, so it didn’t exactly impress me that Jimmy Page was there to work. Bobby definitely provides deep insights into mixing after picking the brains of some of the most successful engineers, but if you're looking for a solid framework on which to build you mixing skills, there are other books to read.