Loudness (In Stages)

Hey, everyone! Welcome to the first Tuesday issue of Clipped Input. Here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Peter’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

• Mk.gee guitar tone re-creation (link)

• How to recognize chord progressions by ear (link)

• Tame Impala breaks down The Slow Rush (link)

🎨 Creative Inspiration: “Basquiat’s Work Ethic”

This video is full of gems about creativity and the process of turning source material into useful inspiration.

Even if you are not interested in visual art or Basquiat, I would highly recommend it. Creativity is multi-disciplinary, and there are countless parallels that will be useful to you as a musician or engineer! The full video is eight minutes long, so it’s not a terribly long watch either.

🖋️ Songwriting: Voice Leading

You may know about “chord inversions,” or at least find the term somewhat familiar, but why are they useful?

For those who are not aware, chord inversions are just rearrangements of the notes in a chord so that the “bottom” note is not the root note. If the root note is the lowest note, this is referred to as the “root position” (and it is not an inversion). Let’s go through a quick example below:

1. CEG (C major, root position)

2. EGC (C major, first inversion)

3. GCE (C major, second inversion)

4. (Third inversions apply for chords with four notes, e.g. seventh chords)

Voice leading is the use of inversions in order to create smoother transitions within a chord progression.

Let’s use the I V vi IV progression, one of the most popular in Western music, as an example of how inversions can create pleasant voice leading.

In the key of C major, this progression would imply the following chords:

C → G → Amin → F

If these chords were all in the root position, you would have the following:

CEG → GBD → ACE → FAC

We can see here that there are significant interval jumps happening. From C → G, for example, only the G stays constant in the chord shape (the fifth of the C chord becomes the root of the G chord). (Audio example included for Members).

Using inversions, we could create the following version of this chord progression:

CEG → DGB → EAC → FAC

We can now see that the chords are flowing together in a different way. In the EAC → FAC transition, only the root note is changing (and only by a half-step, from E to F). This is one common application of voice leading! (Audio example included for Members).

It’s important to note that neither one of these is “correct,” but that you should play with inversions in order to create voicing that makes sense for the context of your song.

Happy to dive much deeper into these kind of chord construction techniques if there is interest!

🎹 Production: Space and Contrast

Today, I want to talk a little bit about reverb and delay in the context of a song.

These tools serve both a functional and emotional purpose:

Functionally, reverb and delay are an important part of the equation when it comes to creating perceived “depth” in your mix. This stems from our psychoacoustic experience as humans! When things are far away, particularly in a large and reflective space like a glass cathedral, the reverb and delay are characteristically prominent.

Creating a space for your record as a whole, and building contrast within it, are both key to great production! Generally, you don’t want every single element to either be far away for up-front. Some pieces should occupy the forward space in the mix, and some pieces should support them by filling up the background.

Dry/wet proportions, the intensity of aux sends, reverb pre-delays and length, delay feedback strength, and more are all tools that you can use to place items within your production.

Take a listen to this piano. Notice how it appears to move further and further away into larger and larger spaces, and then how stark of an effect its return to the front is! (Audio example included for Members).

Emotionally, you can create moments of contrast with the introduction or removal of these effects. One particularly common instance of this is the pre-chorus / chorus transition.

There are countless examples of songs that do one of the following:

• Wet pre-chorus → dry chorus

• Dry pre-chorus → wet chorus

One prominent example of the former is the first pre-chorus and chorus of Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now.” Notice how the pre-chorus feels like it gets “sucked into” the chorus. This is also seen on the verses in reverse (fairly dry verse into wet pre-chorus).

🔊 Engineering: Loudness (In Stages)

Loudness is obviously an extremely broad and in-depth topic, but I wanted to address a piece of it here today.

“Loudness (in stages)” can mean a lot of things (progressive resampling, softclipping, grouping and buss processing, etc.), but today I want to talk specifically about the use of a pre-master buss.

What do I mean by a pre-master buss? I mean taking the full summed signal of your track and routing it as follows:

All individual tracks → pre-master → master

This is not a parallel process, but an additional step in the signal flow.

This allows you to saturate and control how hard you are hitting your chains in two places instead of one. Is your master limiter working too hard? No problem, just pull down the pre-master fader. Not getting enough oomph out of your master chain? Turn up the pre-master in order to hit your processing harder.

This is essentially an extrapolation of the idea that multiple compressors working subtly, particularly when working on groups, produces a much more pleasant result than one compressor doing most of the work. You are able to get the dynamics processing that you need without squashing your mix.

One common use of this processing chain is to hit the pre-master buss fairly hard for glue, pull the fader down on the pre-master to create headroom on what is getting sent to the master, and then use your mastering chain for more saturation (and volume via a transparent limiter with the input gain turned up as needed).

In other words, you can pull an intermediate lever (the volume of your pre-master) instead of changing the sum volume of your song’s tracks directly. This way, you are still able to hit the processing on your pre-master buss with enough force to generate glue and harmonic content while controlling how much work your master chain is doing.

This process allows you to both maximize your perceived loudness and have significantly more control over the character of your mix.

🛠️ Tool: MixHead

Serban Ghenea is one of the most successful mixers of all time. He is also notoriously closed off, having done essentially no interviews.

One of the things known about his process, however, is that he mixes full “in the box.” The exception to this is his SPL Machine Head, which is a physical digital hardware unit. It is essentially a tape saturator that also has some high-frequency adjustment algorithms (so that you can liven or dampen the signal in a way that is not possible with physical tape machines).

Make Believe, in collaboration with MetricHalo, have created an extremely accurate replication of this unit with their MixHead plugin.

(And, yes, it comes with Serban’s endorsement and preset.)

Here is a quick example I put together of A/Bing MixHead on a drum loop (Audio example included for Members).

💬 Quote: Pharrell on Consistency

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