Emotion first, technical details second

When I’m working on a song, it’s really important to me that I think about the song above all. It can be highly tempting when you’re an engineer to immediately get down into the weeds with some technical thing or other. The perfect kick drum sound; the exact right vocal compressor; that sort of thing.

And all that stuff is extremely important! But it shouldn’t come first. It will kill your momentum. And god forbid you’re working with someone else in the room; it will kill the vibe for them completely.

My suggestion: focus on the emotion first. Get roughly the right sounds, as close as you can get quickly — but think first about the energy. The vibe. How the song makes you feel. Find the thing that you’re chasing and chase it relentlessly, damn the torpedoes.

And then, when you have the feel of the thing as good as you can get it, you can go back and tidy up all the loose ends you left along the way.

A big one for me in this regard is how hard I’m hitting my master bus. I alluded to this a couple of days ago. I tend to follow my heart with productions and mixes, and what my heart wants is visceral engagement — which can frequently lead to a working mix that feels awesome but is just way way way too loud. Like, I literally had a mix the other day that ended up at something like -4 LUFS integrated. Wildly inappropriate. It sounded amazing, quietly or on small speakers, but at louder volumes or on better speakers the distortion was unacceptable. Haha.

But that’s a great situation to be in! Re-gain-staging your master bus is a relatively simple exercise. You’ll probably have to rebalance a couple of things that were pushing each other out of the way with the excessive compression and/or limiting that you were accidentally doing, but in my experience those changes are quick and easy. And you’ll still have the bones of the emotion that you put into it.

Get the feel right to start with, and figure out the technical issues second. You’ll end up with a more engaging piece of work every time.

Straight from the heart — jamie