The Mix Review

This month we analyse Bing Crosby's 1947 Christmas classic "White Christmas” as well as a number of contemporary commercial hit record productions.

Robin Thicke

'Blurred Lines'

This production demonstrates how important vocal performance and arrangement are to modern pop hits — because there's precious little else to it! Indeed, the basic eight-bar backing loop is so simple (varied only on a handful of occasions by muting a few parts), that it wouldn't surprise me at all if it'd been put together in the iMPC app during a cigarette break. As such, I have the greatest respect for what Thicke and co-conspirator Pharrell Williams have achieved here.

Take the chorus, for instance. Although ostensibly the baldest of one-note ideas, the "good girl”/”blurred lines” declamations are transformed into killer hooks simply by virtue of expressive glissandos, while the "you know you want it” is made significantly more arresting by dropping its second iteration an octave. On the face of it, these are such primitive devices, but — let's be frank — how few of us would actually have used them in the situation? In general, the range of vocal stylings is dazzling, with the arrangement revealing different facets at a frenetic rate. Listen to verse two, for example: Thicke starts off with a breathy double-tracked falsetto for "what do they make dreams for” at 1:22. Six seconds later "you the hottest” kicks in with a forceful, bluesy, layered chord extending up to a soprano 'D', before 1:30 gives us a more conversational solo delivery in his middle register, accompanied by wide-panned "hey hey hey” layers that are just out of tune enough to sound fashionably stoned. By 1:38, Thicke's moved a little further up his register and is moving into a more clearly sung style, while sporadic gale-force harmonies are added over the top, and then a return to the "hey hey hey” texture at 1:46 (with an added "uh-huh” idea) brings us to the chorus. That's already an enormous amount of variety in one verse, even before you start considering all the wonderful little details: the amusement in his voice on "what rhymes with hug me?” (1:34); the cascading R&B ad libs at 1:36 and 1:55; the wild pitch sweep of "domesticate you” (1:40); and Pharrell's repeating "everybody get up” and Jackson-esque "wooh” contributions.

Another question to ask is this: how much of this arrangement would have been murdered had anyone tried to iron it out with pitch-correction software? While it'd probably be rather naïve to suggest that tuning gizmos played no part in this production (it's pop after all) I never get a sense that I'm hearing that technology, just great performances. And it's not just the "hey hey hey” riff that showcases how technically out-of-tune moments can enhance the swaggering attitude, because the main hook is also far from pure. Who the hell cares when it sounds like that much fun? Mike Senior

Skrillex

'Bangarang'

Although arguably best known for his twelve-tone composition technique, the iconoclastic Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg also coined the term 'Klangfarbenmelodie' (literally 'sound colour melody') in 1911 to refer to the process of shading a melodic line by assigning its different notes to different instruments. But it's taken almost a century for someone to really catapult this idea into the mainstream, as Skrillex has effectively done by butt-editing chains of synth and sample snippets to create his crowd-slaying mega-riffs. I've been a huge fan of his productions since hearing 'Scatta' a few years back, and this latest Grammy-winning track amply demonstrates what I'm talking about.

The present-day Klangfarbenmelodie arrives for the first time with "Bangarang” at 0:25-1:01, and from a chart-music perspective it's extraordinarily efficient because it only ever asks the listener to concentrate on two musical events at once: the drums, and whatever snippet of synth/sample audio is currently in the foreground. There's rarely more than one musical pitch active at any one time either, partly because each audio snippet is kept so brutally distinct from the next — as when the second iteration of the "you feel good” sample at 0:42 is cut short when the rapped word "bass” interjects. While you can't exactly whistle the tune of such a musical mosaic, there's nonetheless an undeniable melodic character to it that sticks in the memory more assiduously than many traditional single-instrument melody lines. And of course the frenzied shifts of timbre and the contrasting acoustic spaces implied by the different samples constitute a barrage of attention-grabbing ear candy into the bargain.

Given that economy of means is such a powerful aid to successful communication in pop styles, it's no surprise to find the Skrillex influence already cross-pollinating. However, what I've heard so far mostly amounts to simple pastiche (with predictable stuck-pig synth garnishings), so I reckon the market remains wide open for creative pop producers to capitalise on the Klangfarbenmelodie concept without any of the EDM baggage. I wonder who'll pick up the gauntlet? Mike Senior

The Lumineers

'Ho Hey'

Creating an effective depth dimension in your mix is about much more than just how much reverb you add. Although the heavy room ambience on this song's titular backing shouts is clearly one of the reasons why they sit well behind the lead vocals, guitar and mandolin, there are two other psychological effects in this production which I think really stretch the front-back perspective. The first is that the foreground instruments simply have more brightness in the top octave of the frequency spectrum. Although Kevin Augunas's vocal EQ is partly responsible for this, the choice of distant miking for the yells is also a factor, I think. Close-miking any source will usually capture more of the extreme highs than distant miking, simply because the microphone picks up a greater proportion of the source's direct sound on axis when used up close, and most mic designs have a significantly brighter timbre on axis than off axis. In addition, though, there's the fact that the foreground parts are unmistakeably being performed a lot less forcefully than the background chant, but nonetheless have no trouble being heard against them in the mix. This, therefore, makes a strong implication that the softer-sounding parts must be a lot closer to the listener, otherwise how else could they compete on such an equal footing in the level balance? Mike Senior

Check the SOS Forum for more comments on the tracks discussed in The Mix Review this month: /mixreview