Article Preview - Secrets Of The Mix Engineers: JJ Puig

The role of the mix engineer is becoming ever more creative. Jack Joseph Puig explains how his imaginative approach helped shape Fergie’s smash hit ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’.

Paul Tingen

Jack Joseph Puig in his mix room at Ocean Way Studios, with its amazing collection of vintage outboard gear.

Photos: Mr Bonzai

“My philosophy is to make records that have a unique sound,” says mix icon Jack Joseph Puig. “Too many records sound the same these days, because everyone is using the same gear. So part of what I’m doing at my mix room is to combine analogue gear from the ’50s onwards with the latest digital equipment you can buy today, and mould all that together in a collage to create a record that has its own sound and that stands out. If the record is faithful to the song and to the artist and also has a different aesthetic to what’s normally out there, you really hit a home run. I want records to leave an indelible mark on listeners and I want them to remember the record because it’s great, not because of what I have done. That’s an art.”

The most recent example of this philosophy is the ear-catching, velvety ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ by Fergie. Having spent eight weeks at the top of the US charts, it promises to become the most successful record of 2007. In addition, in nearly three decades of working in the music business, the Grammy-Award winning mixer has contributed to records from a seemingly endless list of greats, among them the Rolling Stones, No Doubt, all the Crows (Black, Counting, Sheryl), The Verve, U2, Green Day, Snow Patrol, Klaxons, Mary J Blige and Black Eyed Peas.

In recent years, the power of the mix engineer has grown. Many of today’s top mixers will add overdubs, replace parts or move them around, and change the structure of the songs they’re working on; and as a result, they often command royalties as well as the flat fees they’ve traditionally received. Jack Joseph Puig helped set this trend, and continues to be ahead of the pack. “In this day and age, mixers are no longer dependent on what’s given to them on a hard drive,” elaborates Puig, from his mix room in Los Angeles’s Ocean Way Studios. “The capacities of the tools we now have at our disposal are immense. We can do almost anything at the push of a button, and it’s all non-destructive. The day and age when we threw up the faders and thought ‘I wish I had this or that,’ are over. It’s massively acceptable now, and even expected, that we add things.

“When I mixed The Rolling Stones’ [2005] A Bigger Bang album, I reckoned that one of the songs needed a tambourine and a shaker, so I put it on. If Glyn Johns had done that many years ago, he’d have been shot in the head. Mick Jagger was kind of blown away by what I’d done, no-one had ever done it before on a Stones record, but he couldn’t deny that it was great and fixed the record. When I was mixing another song a little bit later he came in and said ‘Last night I overdubbed a shaker, a tambourine and maracas. I thought that if I didn’t do it, you would.’ It’s a moment I’ll never forget.

“Today people are very open-minded about what we do. It’s a matter of us being worthy of what we’re being paid for. It’s about capturing the X-factor, that indescribable element that makes a record great, and sometimes none of us, if we are honest, know how we got there. You throw up all the faders and you’re looking for a feeling, and suddenly you hit it, and it’s intangible why. Was it the delay? The EQ? I’m extremely lyric-driven, and all I have to help convey what the singer tries to say are two pieces of paper and a magnet that’s moving air. And somehow I have to make you feel sad or happy, or whatever the emotion is, with EQs and compressors. When you think about it, you wonder ‘How is that possible?’”

Puig’s key tool in imparting feel is the compressor. “Compression is definitely the most musical tool that we have. I don’t care for compression as a volume control. Using compression to alter feel and to affect performances has been done for a long time. For instance, it was common in the ’80s to take a really fast compressor, like the Dbx 165, set it really aggressively, send a snare drum to it, and then gate that sound as tightly as possible. What you get is a ‘kh-kh-kh-kh’ sound, just an attack note that’s extremely aggressive. You put that under a separate fader, which becomes your attack fader, and you feed that in with the regular snare to get the degree of attack that you want.

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