Mixing with Ed Cherney: persistence is as important as gear

Ed Cherney has distinguished himself as a recording and mixing engineer as well as a producer. Cherney's background includes the R&B scene in Chicago, where he began as an apprentice engineer in 1976. His R&B roots served as a solid foundation for his later work with such rock and pop artists as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, the B-52's, and Roy Orbison. He received a Grammy® for Engineer of the Year for Bonnie Raitt's Longing in Their Hearts.

Cherney works wherever a project dictates, from Los Angeles to Nashville. He prefers to mix through SSL 9000 J consoles, as well as Neve 8078s. He typically records to 24-track analog, but uses ADATs, DA-88s and/or Sony 48 tracks as the project requires. Although his gear may be high-end, his mixing tips and advice are practical.

What's the best approach for building a mix?
Having a great song certainly helps. If you're working with a singer, start with the vocal. What I do, if I haven't heard the song before, is push up all the faders and listen to what's there, see where the song is. From there I try to eliminate things to find the heart of the song. I start dry, not using any effects or EQ at first, just to find the heart and soul of the song. I strip it down to its barest essentials.

How do you get a vocal to sit in the mix?
Depending on the style of music—if you want a dry vocal or a distorted vocal or a ballad-y kind of reverb—you just have to see where the vocal frequency range is and try to carve out space in the mix. You have to carve out space where the bass is or where the guitars might be or where the keyboards might be.

A vocal that's not loud enough typically isn't a good mix, but a vocal that's too loud is a worse mix. It's important to listen to the vocal on a lot of different speakers. On one set, the vocal may be loud and on another set it may be buried. It's important to reference your mix in other places, like your car, blasters, at friends' houses, at home, and so on.

Placing the vocal is about the hardest thing to do. Typically, the battle is that the vocal is either too loud or too soft. Unless you're in Nashville, of course, and then the vocal can never be too loud. Country records really ask for a vocal that's out front because people want to hear all the lyrics.

How do you mix for rock vs. mixing for R&B?
When you do a rock track, it's really about recognizing that rock is based around the guitars, so it's about getting the guitars to speak. You still certainly have to rock the rhythm, but I don't think the rhythm is in your face as much as the guitars.

When you're mixing a Rolling Stones song, you better make sure that the guitars are forward. If you're mixing a song for Ice Cube, you better make sure that the beat is forward.

Do you compress your stereo mix?
I sure do. We live in an age of volume, and, especially in the digital domain, you have the ability to finalize things and really get the most level possible. Nowadays, dynamics in music aren't that important, at least not in the pop music we listen to. That may change again as we get more into 5.1 and 96 kHz, 24-bit sampling.

I came from an era where dynamics could be very important, but now we're in a time where competition on the radio is fierce. You have to make sure that your song pops out of the radio speakers in a car while the listener is driving 90 miles an hour with the windows open. Currently, there are not a lot of subtleties involved in pop music. You get the music forward and you keep it forward and it better be as loud as the previous song on the radio and hopefully louder than the next one.

What's your overriding principal or prime directive as a mixer?
I try to make the music speak. I try to be a bulldog about it, to not give up on a song. I get in there and dig and get everything out of it I possibly can, which is a very difficult thing to do, especially because I'm basically a lazy person. But I keep on digging until I get everything I can out of a song. Bonnie Raitt's song "Thing Called Love" is a good example. It was a big hit for her, but I went back and mixed that song three different times to finally find the pocket and the maximum groove and emotion in it.

Ultimately, mixing is about heart, not equipment. Nobody leaves a session dancing to what kind of gear you use. The tools you use should be as invisible as possible. When someone sees a ditch, they're not thinking about what kind of shovel was used to dig it, just how deep and wide the hole is.