The Mix Review | February 2012

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Article Preview :: Analysing Commercial Productions

Published in SOS February 2012

Technique : Mix Review


Maroon 5
‘Moves Like Jagger’
The whistled part in this production is a masterstroke on a number of levels. For a start, it presents the chorus’s key melodic moment right away, despite the song’s lyrics preventing the vocal from delivering it so early on. It also pops up all over the rest of the arrangement to ensure that you’re never more than 15 seconds from a reminder of the chorus, and allows a convenient means of signing off the song with an extra repetition of the final hook — all very savvy from a commercial perspective.
Then there’s the way that the whistling tracks the vocal fairly closely during the choruses, but deviates distinctly from it right at the end of the line, which to my mind actually draws more of your attention back to the vocal/whistle pairing for the important final “like Jagger”. (The arrangement pockets at 0:58 and 1:58 do a similar job.) The little vinyl-style pitch drops at 1:28 and the end of the song are also great, especially because they once again focus attention on the phrase’s critical end portion.
I think the drum parts are very effective too. The clap/snare backbeat has the kind of short, super-dense electronic sustain that (coincidentally) always reminds me of Christina Aguilera’s ‘Genie In A Bottle’. The advantage of a timbre like this is that it doesn’t really rely on its attack to cut through the mix, so it’ll continue to speak reliably even if it has to compete with simultaneous kick hits, or if the mix gets pulped by extreme dynamics processing during mastering and/or broadcast. Furthermore, because the sustain isn’t a product of reverb processing, it enables the mix to remain poptastically up-front sounding.
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Published in SOS February 2012

 

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