Understanding and Crafting the Mix: The Art of Recording

by William Moylan

Understanding and Crafting the Mix gives you clear and systematic methods for identifying, evaluating, and shaping the artistic elements in music and audio recording. The exercises throughout help you to develop critical listening and evaluating skills and gain greater control over the quality of your recordings.
William Moylan takes an inside look into a range of popular music, including recordings by The Beatles, offering you insights into making meaningful sound judgements during recording. Sample production sequences and descriptions of the recordist's roles as composer, conductor and performer provides you with a clear view of the entire recording process.
The foreword has graciously been provided by industry legend Rupert Neve.
The book also includes an audio CD featuring exercises, reference materials, examples of mixes and sound qualities, and tracks and instructions for setting up and evaluating playback systems.

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Callum · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some great parts in here, if you can wade through the repetition, vagueness, and inconsistencies. I'd recommend it for people who are reasonably experienced, looking for a new angle to broaden their knowledge. I'm making a mix of many mics on a single source, and I was searching for a library book which would help me craft a blend of close mics and room mics.

This book offers a pretty different approach to what I've seen elsewhere, because it's almost entirely focused on listening: from analysing the top-level structure of a piece of music, all the way down to hearing pitch and volume envelopes of individual partials within a note, and mapping out the timing (in milliseconds) of individual reflections within a reverb tail. The huge takeaway for me was that perceived distance mostly comes from the complexity of timbre. Some of the exercises are useful.

It stresses the importance of objective analysis. But then it compares loudness of two sounds using subjective phrases like '10% of the way between mezzo forte and forte' rather than decibels. Similarly, it encourages discussing spectral density as lows/low mids/mids/high mids/highs, which I found frustrating as I'm used to thinking in frequencies instead.

The final part of the book (recording, mixing, mastering) is relatively short, so there's little advice on why you might make certain choices. EQ and compression don't get mentioned until 300 pages in, so this really isn't recommended for beginners who are trying to get going quickly. The attached CD only goes as far as a drum bus mix, the exercises are on Beatles releases and the author presents no full mixes of their own.

[Michel Iseneld · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely genius from the first pages :)

[Peter Trainor · Rating 5 out of 5]

DISTANCE LOCATION IS NOT VOLUME IT IS THE AMOUNT OF LOW LEVEL TIMBRAL DETAIL PRESENT IN A SOUND