Mixing Foundations: A Cookbook for the Modern Music Producer - Chapter 1 - Introduction

Next Level Sound

Mixing Foundations: A Cookbook for the Modern Music Producer - Chapter 1 - Introduction

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This is the Introduction to Mixing Foundations—My personal experiences that laid the groundwork for our world-famous courses on saturation, compression, EQ, reverb, and much more. (8–10 minute read)

About the Author
Daniel Wyatt is a multi-genre, Emmy-nominated, Platinum-selling music producer, engineer, and educator based on the East Coast with over 40 years of professional experience.

My First Official Major Record Label Release

Recording the Album - A Tribute to Curtis Mayfield

Easily the most cherished memory of my music journey to date was flying to Atlanta to Curtis Mayfield's house and recording Curtis Mayfield's vocals for a track that I co-produced and played congas on for a band that I co-founded, Repercussions. I think I literally remember every second of that day - and I can replay the entire "movie" memory from start to finish.

That track became a single and was a cover of "Let's Do It Again" and was featured as track 3 on the Tribute to Curtis Mayfield Album that featured Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder, Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Bruce Springsteen, Gladys Knight, B.B King, Steve Winwood, Lenny Kravitz - just to name a few. 

 [ A Tribute To Curtis Mayfield album front cover ]

The album achieved notable chart success, reaching 56 on the US Billboard 200 and 17 on the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart.  

While I had been involved with some noteworthy independent releases, this was my first official major label release as a producer and musician, and I absolutely felt like I was on top of the world.

As we mixed the song at River Sound (Donald Fagen's Upper East Side Manhattan Studio), people in the room spontaneously burst into tears every time Curtis's verse played. This went on for days.

(Incidentally, there is a rare remix of the track mixed by Bob Power (a mentor and friend) floating around the internet for those who know how to dig in virtual crates.)

[ A Tribute To Curtis Mayfield album back cover ]

I will share more details about that story in the book, but this was my glittering and very fortunate entry into the music game.

But let's start at the beginning.

My Early Musical Beginnings

I started playing music when I was in kindergarten at a Quaker school in Philadelphia. I played violin, and I wasn’t exactly a prodigy. In fact, I think I sounded terrible—but my parents clapped and it was cute, so it was a perfectly positive way to get started with music. 

Exposure to Music during High School and College

Later on, when my family moved to Eugene, Oregon, we lived across from the university music conservatory, and all I heard all day as a kid was people singing scales (which, obviously, could drive anyone insane after a while). But music was around.

In high school, I started playing drums. I was OK, but it didn’t quite get the multi-neural dexterity multi-tasking thing where I got it to be fun, so I kind of got away from that for a while—and instrumentalism in general—and focused on soccer and break-dancing.

But then, in college at Columbia University in New York City, my academic focus and NCAA Division I soccer career slowly transitioned into a deeper and more committed return to music.

It was NYC in the 80s - the birth of hip hop - and the city was vibrant.

 [ Columbia University ]

Finishing class at Columbia on a Friday meant jumping on the train downtown and linking with my downtown friends. The Roxy and The Funhouse—the seminal early hip-hop clubs—did not open until around midnight, and we usually left around 6 a.m. And it was all happening there.

But with all the dancing, I also wanted to get back into playing an instrument.

Using the classified section of the Village Voice, I found a conga instructor who was a true master of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian music. I began to study with him a few times a week. Soon, I began taking dance classes with him around the city, and we even played a few all-night Vodou ceremonies in Brooklyn that were really amazing. From there, I got deeper into folkloric percussion and drumming, eventually starting a drumming circle at Columbia.

I’ve always described informal drumming circles as “music that's much more fun to play than to listen to.” With that in mind, our circle started adding other instruments. We brought in bass and guitar, we started to actually write songs, and then we even got a singer, Nicole Willis (Google her, she’s had an amazing career!). 

Signing with Warner Bros. Records

We called our band Repercussions[1], and soon, we started playing shows in downtown New York.

With Giant Step as our management team, we played shows with many of my favorite groups growing up in Berkeley, California: George Clinton & P-Funk All Stars, The Ohio Players, The Gap Band, Gil Scott Heron, and Roy Ayers! As well as new acts like The Brand New Heavies and Brand Nubian.

So what started as a wonky drum circle evolved into a fresh "new soul" ensemble with songs.

At one show, a studio manager and talent scout named Scott Barkham came down from River Sound.

“I'm looking for bands,” Scott the scout told us after our set. “My boss is Gary Katz.” As in Gary Katz, the Steely Dan producer. Blue chip stocks of American music, classic rock stuff. You might be too young, but it was a big deal. So Gary came to one of our shows, and two weeks later, we were all on a plane to meet Lenny Waronker—the president of Warner Brothers Records, who signed Prince.

[ Scott Barkham ]

At the time, we only had one recorded song. Nevertheless, thanks to Scott Barkham, we got a million-dollar record deal. So we went into the studio and recorded this very analog album with big consoles, tape, and microphones. There was some early digital technology, but it was pretty old school for the most part. As is expected with any band, there were clashing visions of what that album was supposed to be.

I wanted us to be like the Fujis, with programmed drums mixed with live instruments and a lot of low-end. Others wanted a vintage sound. I'd leave the room, and they’d turn down the bass; they'd leave the room, and I turned it up. That went on for a year. Despite this low-end dispute, the album, Earth and Heaven, came out. 

[ Earth and Heaven album cover ]

Successful Sales and Radio Hit in Japan

As soon as our album came out, Lenny Waronker left Warner Bros. to work at DreamWorks. And once the new administration at Warner Brothers showed up, Lenny’s very expensive project for his darling band (us), had to go too.

We ended up selling something like 14 copies in the United States. But in Japan, we had nearly a gold record and a radio hit! So we would play shows in the Midwest, and there'd be, like, four people at the show. But then we’d go to Tokyo and play for hundreds and hundreds of screaming fans at sold-out shows. And we’d get in the cab and the drivers would have white gloves, and we’d hear Madonna on the radio, then we’d hear “Promise Me Nothing”, our song. We were like that Tom Waits song, “Big in Japan.” It was surreal, and it was really cool.

Building a Studio Audio Engineer Career

After a few years of being an underground "new soul" rock star in Japan, I felt like I had gotten my taste and it was time to explore other avenues of music: I wanted to try running a small studio. I found an ad for an NYC hotel with an empty 15th floor—they actually wanted to rent the floor out to artists and musicians, or so they thought at the time. I was the first one to answer the ad, so I took a corner office and helped populate that floor.

That hotel floor ended up being the home of Rawkus Records, Rupert Murdoch’s son’s label, with his two friends from Brown, who wanted to make alternative hip-hop and rock. They had Mos Def and all these cool backpack artists who managed to get very famous and sell many records, doing everything underground. Carlos Bess, the head engineer for Wu-Tang Clan, was also there. Arthur Baker, who did Planet Rock, got a studio. There was dank smoke and music leaking out from under every door of the 15th floor of the New Yorker Hotel on 34th and 9th Avenue. We had quite a run on the 15th floor of the New Yorker until eventually the owners had enough of the chaos and evicted all of us.

[ Rawkus Record Label Logo ]

First DAW - Early Pro Tools

That hotel is where I really started to build my studio engineering career. I couldn’t afford a Neve console or an SSL console, but I could afford a brand-new Pro Tools system that did not consistently work. We’d sometimes lose people’s best takes. You know how they talk about the cutting edge and the bleeding edge of technology? This was the bleeding edge. But I didn’t have a plan B, so we became beta testers for Pro Tools. I stuck with it, and then I became known as the guy who could fearlessly run Pro Tools and get it to do things that the other engineers couldn't figure out at that time.

[ Old Pro Tools News Article ]

Dave Swanson, a good friend of mine, was a producer for Blues Traveler, a very famous pop jam band in the ‘90s with radio hits. One day, Dave asked me if I could edit a whole bunch of live performances together before the mixing stage so he wouldn’t have to mix unnecessary things and then cut them together. I said, “Yeah, of course I can,” but it was daunting. So we'd work on it, and everything would crash. I would send people out to lunch while I slapped the gear around. It was a very pioneering, scary time. But we worked it out, and that album, Live from the Fall, ended up being my first platinum record as an audio engineer.

[ Live From The Fall Album Cover ]

From there, everything just grew. There was a guy from the East Village, Ilhan Ershahin, who had a cool jazz/soul ensemble, and we recorded his first album in that genre. And then there was a young woman from Texas who had this wonderful, amazing voice. That was Norah Jones. And that band was Wax Poetic, for whom I secured a record deal with Ultra Records.

For Wax Poetic, I was a drum programmer, recording engineer, mixing and mastering engineer, bus driver, and manager.

Everything was fun - except the manager part.

Being in New York City, I got to work with different people who created different genres. The city at that time was a vibrant melting pot with unstoppable cross-pollination. It was an epicenter of culture where all kinds of cool music was coming through, and I couldn’t get enough of it. 

[ Ol' Dirty Bastard ]

Before he passed away, I was blessed to record a vocal session with Ol' Dirty Bastard. I will never forget how he showed up in a green plaid golf outfit with a crumpled piece of notepaper and was finished in about 11 minutes. I was still adjusting the microphone and compression when he finished his verse. Before I could tell him I was ready, he told me he was done. He was ready for his "fill-ins".

I wasn't exactly going to argue with Mr. Bastard.

We were in fact done in a few minutes, and it came out dope.

From Studio to Classroom: My Teaching Journey

Once I started a family, though, I didn’t want to be coming home from the studio at 8:00 in the morning anymore. I wanted to see the kids grow up and be around and available. So, I started to teach at SAE Institute of Technology New York, a traditional engineering school in the sense that they had some newer technology and Pro Tools, but they also had analog consoles and tape. A bit of an “old school” school if you will, but I came from that stuff, and I was happy to teach it.

Over the span of five years, I taught courses on mastering, effects, microphones, all kinds of things. I realized I love teaching because it helped me—I didn't go to school for this stuff, so I learned on the job. And let me tell you, I wish I had an online school as a resource back then. It took me so much longer to learn, so when I started to teach, I wanted to make a systematic teaching curriculum that was complete, integrated, and logical. 

[ SAE Institute Logo ]

Working on big projects in New York City, I watched the best people in the world work.

I could sit and watch as one person did something one way, then someone working in a very different genre did the same thing the same way, then someone else with a totally different background did it the exact same way. At that point, you realize, “Well, that's the right way to do it.” So I started to put together a system to teach people by distilling and aggregating what I observed in those years.

Teaching Electronic Music Production at Dubspot

After some time at SAE, I got called to do a lecture down at Dubspot, a DJ and production school teaching electronic music, Ableton Live, that type of thing. Totally different vibe from SAE. But once people actually pursue being a DJ, they realize that the famous DJs make their own music, not just play other people's music. So then you have to learn composition, production, mixing, and mastering. That’s why I was asked to come in. And while I was there, I thought, “This is a good place for me. This is the future.” And the folks at Dubspot must’ve been thinking the same because they basically hired me on the spot.

 [ Dubspot Logo ]

Once I created Dubspot’s Mixing and Mastering program, I initially had to teach classes in my apartment in Brooklyn because we didn’t have classrooms yet. Eventually, we became the number one brand in electronic music education. And then the owner of the school decided we were going to make an online school. I was all about that idea, and we quickly became a very prominent online school. Unfortunately, Dubspot eventually ran its course but I wanted to keep what was positive about it going because I thought it was so cool and innovative.

The Start of NextLevelSound.com

Inspired by the spirit of Dubspot’s online program, I started MixMasterWyatt Academy in 2016. We quickly became Google's top-rated mixing and mastering program.

[ MixMasterWyatt Academy Logo ]

It grew and grew and grew - maybe too fast at times - but I still had a desire to create a "complete" school. A complete home for the modern music producer that could do online or live training with the best teachers in all the different disciplines, a complete experience. That was my dream. So in 2018, we rebranded MixedMasterWyatt Academy to become Next Level Sound. With the goal of helping anyone learn how to get the professional sound they’ve been searching for, we have a simple philosophy:

Why I Wrote This Book

 You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know. How Could You?

Anyone who has ever attempted or even considered diving into the world of mixing and mastering knows there are countless questions that can come up in the process:  

Why does compression seem so complicated? What does attack do? What does the release do? What's plate reverb? When do I use it? When do I use a room? When do I use a hall? Sidechaining isn’t just for French house music, right?

 [ Screenshot of Pro-C 2, Valhalla VintageVerb and Pure Plate Reverb ]

The list could go on and on, but I don’t want to burden you with more questions than you already have. I want to provide nothing but answers. 

The purpose of this book is to create a simple, logical, and methodical approach to mixing for the modern producer. It is by no means exhaustive—quite the opposite. There are plenty of dense texts out there that are guaranteed to either overwhelm you with information (often presented with a bit of pretentiousness, I might add) or just make you fall asleep on your interface. My goal here is to be conversational, like we’re hanging out in the studio together. That’s how I learned, and so I want to replicate that experience as best I can in text form. 

Cooking Analogy and Influences from the *Chez Panisse Cooking* Book

This book is modeled after one of my favorite cookbooks, Chez Panisse Cooking by Alice Waters, an essential cooking reference for me. It has clear recipes, the philosophy and history behind the approaches, and some entertaining and relevant anecdotes along the way. If you haven’t made the analogy before (and I know I’m not the first to come up with it), cooking and music production are a lot alike. There are staple foods of different cuisines, just like signature sounds found in different genres. Methods and techniques are handed down, refined, and reimagined over the years. Different people have different tastes. You get the idea.

When you begin mixing, there are so many ingredients in front of you that it's hard to know which ones to choose. Once you understand mixing, there are so many things to remember, so it's good to have reminders. I want this mixing guide to serve as a valuable “cookbook” and trusty reference guide on the desks and desktops of the modern music producer, much like Panisse Cooking is in my kitchen.

We’re making music here, it should be fun!

CONTENTS

Monitoring and Referencing
-fletcher munson curve
-headphones vs. speakers
-room acoustics
-reference tracks

Channelstrip Processing
-workflow
-inter-plugin gain structure
-saturation
-transformer, transistor, tube, tape

Equalization
-reductive eq
-compression
-musical vs. technical

Additive EQ
-musical

Sidechaining
-tango
-single band vs multiband

Reverb
-creating depth
-types of reverb
-relatedness
-using multiple reverbs

Panning
-by frequency
-creating width and space

Mix Buss Construction
-console, tape, limiter
-when to apply the limiter

Level Balancing
-typing

Gain Structure Management
-kick anchor

Automation

Rendering
-stems
-premaster
-bouncing with the placeholder limiter

Revising
-creating iterations
-resisting the temptation to change everything
-moving in order of importance

Mastering
-outsourcing the mastering vs. doing it yourself