Bruce Swedien-An excerpt from "The Mixing Engineer's Handbook"

By Bobby Owsinski Perhaps no one else in the studio world can so aptly claim the moniker of "Godfather of Recording" as Bruce Swedien. Universally revered by his peers, Bruce has earned that respect thanks to years of stellar recordings for the cream of the musical crop. His credits could fill a book alone, but legends like Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Nat "King" Cole, George Benson, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Edgar Winter and Jackie Wilson are good places to start. Then comes Bruce's Grammy winning projects which include Michael Jackson's Thriller (the biggest selling record of all time), Bad and Dangerous, and Quincy Jones' Back on the Block and Juke Joint. As one who has participated in the evolution of modern recording from virtually the beginning as well as being one of its true innovators, Bruce is able to give insights on mixing from a perspective that few of us will ever have. Do you start to do your mix from the very first day of tracking? Yes, but again I don't think that you can say any of these thoughts are across the board. There are certain types of music that grow in the studio. You go in and start a rhythm track and think you're gonna have one thing and all of a sudden it does a sharp left and it ends up being something else. While there are other types of music where I start the mix even before the musicians come to the studio. I'll give you a good example of something. On Michael's History album, for the song "Smile, Charlie Chaplin," I knew what that mix would be like two weeks before the musicians hit the studio. From listening to the demo? No. It had nothing to do with anything except what was going on in my mind because Jeremy Lubbock, the orchestra arranger and conductor, and I had talked about that piece of music and the orchestra that we were going to use. I came up with a studio setup that I had used with the strings of the Chicago Symphony many years before at Universal where the first violins are set up to the left of the conductor and the second violins to the right, the violas behind the first fiddles and the cello behind the second fiddles, which is a little unusual. So I had that whole mix firmly in mind long before we did it. How many versions of a mix do you do? Usually one. Although when I did "Billie Jean," I did 91 mixes of that thing and the mix that we finally ended up using was mix 2. I had a pile of 1/2" tapes to the ceiling. And we thought, "Oh man, it's getting better and better." [laughs] What do you do to make a mix special? I wish I knew. I have no idea. But the best illustration of something special is when we were doing "Billie Jean" and Quincy said, "Okay, this song has to have the most incredible drum sound that anybody has ever done but it also has to have one element that's different, and that's sonic personality." So I lost a lot of sleep over that. What I ended up doing was building a drum platform and designing some special little things like a bass drum cover and a flat piece of wood that goes between the snare and the hi-hat. And the bottom line is that there aren't many pieces of music where you can hear the first three or four notes of the drums and immediately tell what piece of music it is. But I think that is the case with "Billie Jean," and that I attribute to sonic personality. But I lost a lot of sleep over that one before it was accomplished. http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com ... icle.jsp?id=12176-0

JennylovesMJ

Sounds like a sweet guy