Article Preview - Mix Rescue: Pocket Lips

When you're trying to achive a tight, commercial hip-hop sound, you might need to resort to some heavy processing — but not on every track...

Mike Senior

When hip-hop collective Pocket Lips sent in their track 'Rock Show' for Mix Rescue, they were pretty happy with the way their tracking sessions had gone: drums, bass, keyboard, and scratching had been recorded together to get a live vibe, and the arrangment had been completed with further vocal and instrumental overdubs. However, they wanted more of a pop feel to the sound, and hadn't been able to get things sounding tight and upfront enough.

Editing For A More Upfront Sound

The live hip-hop collective Pocket Lips had recorded the main body of their song 'Rock Show' as a single take, and although this gave a great live vibe, it also left some timing issues to be dealt with at the editing stage.

As usual with Mix Rescue tracks, the reasons for this weren't just to do with mixing technique, and in this case some of the malaise was down to their recording method. Now don't get me wrong — doing live takes as a band is great for getting a vibe going, and works fine for some styles, but it's almost impossible in this way to get the rhythm tight enough to compete with the precision of most commercial urban and pop releases.

Fortunately, the band had been able to keep decent separation between the recorded parts while they were tracking, and spill and phase relationships imposed very few editing restrictions — so I exercised the audio scissors to tighten things up a bit. When working with good live drumming like this, quantising everything to your sequencer's grid will kill the groove stone-dead, so I left the drums well alone. Instead, I used them as a reference point for editing the timing of many of the other parts, starting with the bass and then slotting in the turntables, keyboards and vocals on top, one at a time.

I dealt with techniques for editing timing in quite a bit of detail for SOS October 2008's Mix Rescue, so I won't go into all that again here. What I will add, though, is that this editing accounted for about half the overall mixing time, and I tried to get all of it out of the way before getting into any serious mixing decisions: editing and mixing are mentally very different tasks, and it's easy to get bogged down in one to the detriment of the other when you try to do them at the same time.

One of the techniques for making the important sounds more upfront was editing out competing sounds in the background to reduce frequency-masking effects. You can see one example of this technique in this screen shot where Mike has edited a gap into all the bass tracks (bottom, in red red) during the song's double snare-hit drum hook.

While I was at it, I took the opportunity to mute various things so that getting an upfront sound would be easier. Let me explain how this works. In most busy mixes, the listener's ear is constantly 'refocusing' on different parts as they all jockey for attention. To take a visual analogy, it's a bit like watching a football match. While you're focusing on the player in possession, the other players are only in your peripheral vision — and are seen in less detail. When the ball's passed to another player, you shift your focus to him instead, and it's then the first player's turn to be in your peripheral vision.

Where this analogy breaks down, though, is that audio parts to which you're not specifically paying attention will still, to some extent, obscure the sound your ear is focused on, making that less clearly audible than it might be. If you can switch off some of the competing parts while they're psychologically in the background like this, you'll usually find that the foreground stuff sounds more upfront. What's more, non-technical listeners rarely notice if you briefly drop out some background parts — because their attention is, of course, directed at the sounds at the front of the mix.

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Article Preview - Mix Rescue: Pocket Lips

Hip-hop processing