Lenne’s Kickstarter campaign topped $8,000 yesterday, show that it has legs with 125 backers and 12 days to go. Help her mix and master and reach her stretch goal of $10,000 at Kickstarter.com.
Lenne’s official Kickstarter photo.
One of the things she is funding with the campaign is mixing by Neilson Hubbard in Nashville. Neilson is a phenomenal mixer who gives real meaning to the term “mixing engineer.” In the age of Pro Tools, it seems everyone with a plug-in and a mouse is a “mixing engineer” but I don’t see it like that.
Mixing is blend of art and science, and it comes down to a trained ear, a phenomenal music sensibility and experience, lots of experience. I see the mixer as an artist primarily, but also a technician. The music producer often gets a top level credit, but it the mixer who brings the music to life.
It’s getting harder to find excellent mixers as non-hip hop CDs sell fewer and fewer copies. Many mixers have migrated to film and commercial work. Most upper-tier mixers are generalists, work also as tracking engineers, do film and TV work, create commercials, or work as musicians as well. That’s okay, but unless they have a sufficient volume of high quality artists to mix they have a hard time in the marketplace.
Lenne cruises around Nashville. Check out her Kickstarter site for the video.
We were so thankful to find Neilson, and grateful when we found ourselves to part of a great team. And we had negotiated with some really wonderful mixers–it was a tough decision with a debut album riding on the equation. I told Neilson I wanted to make a classic vocal album, something that would stand the test of time rather than enter in the flavor of the month club. He was astonishingly good at making room for the vocal. It may sound simple, but it’s not. And it’s not just a matter of compression and reverb–not at all.
It really is a kind of magic space. When you hear a perfect mix, you can’t imagine it any other way. It just is, like a gem. As a tracking engineer, producer, and session player, it is such a pleasure to take tracks I recorded, and know to the nth degree, and just give them to a pro who hears what he hears and acts on it.
I’m no mixer, will never be, and literally don’t have the hearing for it, after a few too many years in the rock n’roll trenches. So it is entirely gratifying to collaborate with an artist to create the music you will be hearing in a few months. Stay tuned, it’s worth the wait.
Now back to that Kickstarter campaign…