Audio Balance Quotes

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

I like a good mono track, it's right up front. I don't need all the surrounds telling me there are birds in the neighbourhood.

As a film composer I deal with short bursts of musical ideas that are defined to a large extent by what's happening on the screen, by not only narrative and action, but staying out of the way of dialogue, sound effects.

They don't bother too much with the balance and things on blues records.

With a huge storm, you need a lot of volume, but it can't become one loud noise. Dolby Atmos helped a lot because it gave us the separation of those elements.

Sound should bring you in. We have people in all these specialized departments to make it one whole. They are supposed to work together to bring us into their world, not push us away. For example, rock music has to be loud, but it doesn't have to be too loud.

The stuff that I make and the things that I talk about, you have to listen, so if the beat is doing too much, it's going to take you away. If the hook is too distracting, it's going to take you away. The hook just needs to be enough to get you from one verse to the next.

I worry about technical details - did I mix the cello half a decibel too high? Things like that.

Dolby was in the driver's seat. "Surround Sound" was added. Now we had three speakers behind the screen, two more on the left side of the theater, and two on the right. A closely guarded secret about all this is that you hear the correct balance only if you're sitting in the center of the theater. On the left or right side, those speakers tend to dominate.

When you listen to stereo on your home system, your both ears hear both speakers. Turn on the left speaker sometime and notice you're hearing it also in your right ear.

In music, what is very important is temporality of space and length, based on the breathing space the director gives the music within the film, by separating the music from various elements of reality, like noises, dialogues... That's how you treat music properly, but it doesn't always happen this way. Music is often blamed, but it's not its fault.

I am usually a pacer. I go to the balcony to check the sight lines way up there, to check the sound system to see how the balance is.

That's a sound design thing but then we wanted to do music that would not disturb it and at the same time drive it.

Every time I talk about this, I say: when the singer is singing, he must be respected, you must be able to hear what he's saying. You can't put a trombone and a drum up there, and a microphone on the drum, microphones on everybody. You can't hear what he's saying.

Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it's overcompensating for something missing in the song's structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it's never like an assault.

Historically, there is a fight between the sound designer and the composer. You see them in the mixing room and they're always fighting because the composer wants the music to be heard and the sound designer wants the sound to be heard.

When you've got insane drums and a lot of guitar, it's really hard to mix the vocals, to mix it all well.

For my first album, I thought it was most important for people to hear my voice and to not let it be drowned out by too many lasers and other sounds.