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[resolectric]

typek wrote on Sat, 30 August 2008 22:21

I was talkin' with my girlfriend the other night.. She's a student, studying illustration... She was frustrated at a piece that she's been working on-- and she says: "I can clearly see the result I want in my head, but it is impossible for me to get that, exactly how I see it in my minds eye, onto the paper" I then argued that it's not impossible, people do it all the time with music, specifically mixing. Therefore, it should be the same with art, right?..

I believe it's not exactly the same thing since what we do when mixing is adapting other people's "art" into a view, a balance, of our own.

We can have a picture of how something should sound, how one sound should interact with the other, and by using our imagination, our skills and our tools, achieve the result we had envisioned.

It's different with the artist that creates the original piece; the "work of art".
And i believe that is what your girlfriend was referring to: she is not adapting other people's creation to a vision of her own.

She doesn't get to grab a series of objects, visual art fragments (she's an illustrator, right?) and adapt and combine those into a final piece, right?
If she is working on the piece, the "work of art", from creation, then her work is more related to that of the composer/musician than to the work of the "mixer".

I don't know if you make music yourself, but i would bet that if you do you'll have imagined certain compositions that were quite difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with any combination of instruments or musicians.
Maybe that's what she means.

[0dbfs]

Well, a graphical artist is working within a set of both technical and artistic attributes to achieve a certain output or deliverable.

Working with and mixing music is similar in that from an engineering or production standpoint there are purely technical sonic issues as well as artistic musical issues to deal with and take into account.

My approach is that the more technically adept and experienced one becomes, the more able one is to let go of the technical rules and aspects and best allow the creative and musical aspects to take the foreground. Part of that notion is that there is only middle ground with no such thing as absolutes. Everything is open to how we interpret what is presented to us, what we do with it, and how others interpret our efforts and involvement.

If one were to "analogize" production and mixing with politics one may theoretically take the far left approach or the far right approach. In reality there are many issues involved and a personal-position or approach to any issue will lie somewhere between the left and the right.

Cheers,
j

[RSettee]

I'm an artist--I paint and draw, and there's definetely alot of parallels to recording. Namely that you can erase and rework things until they come close to matching what it is that is in your head, your vision. If it doesn't match up right away, that's fine...most of us aren't naturally talented enough to nail things right away, and I think that if it was done too quickly, perfected too soon, you'd miss out on the whole journey of trying a bunch of things that work alot better. I find that I throw out more than I keep--various mixes, various recordings, etc.

What i've found with trial and error and erasing and reworking things, is that there's often accidents that lead to really interesting results. There's tons of things that i've done with delays and feedbacked delays and backwards pitch shifters that are never the same thing twice--i'll be mixing different versions and they have different qualities with different settings. There's some things that i've done on MicroKorg where I intentionally haven't saved patches, so that the sound is never the same way twice, especially filters and things like that.

[resolectric]

RSettee wrote on Wed, 24 September 2008 23:55

I'm an artist--I paint and draw, and there's definetely alot of parallels to recording. ...

But do you work (or should i say "rework") other people's paintings?

I believe that when you're creating a painting, a drawing or a sculpture there are in fact a lot of parallels with composing, not with mixing.

Mixing is a "rework" of someone else's creation.
It's like doing oil on canvas starting out with a photo.

[RSettee]

resolectric wrote on Fri, 26 September 2008 06:07

RSettee wrote on Wed, 24 September 2008 23:55 I'm an artist--I paint and draw, and there's definetely alot of parallels to recording. ... But do you work (or should i say "rework") other people's paintings? I believe that when you're creating a painting, a drawing or a sculpture there are in fact a lot of parallels with composing, not with mixing. Mixing is a "rework" of someone else's creation. It's like doing oil on canvas starting out with a photo.

I'm referring more to recording, where the artist has the time to do extra takes--you can't add something that was never recorded, so the more brush strokes (tracks, takes, etc) you do, the more you're likely to arrive at something that you're happier with, later. Not in every case, but some options down the road are great. In any case, you can erase, paint over the initial things if you don't like them--both in art and in recording. I think that the blank recording medium has alot to do with a blank canvas--some ideas seem great in one's head or in theory, but in practicality, they don't always gel and that's where more brushstrokes or more takes or more tracks come in handy.

On almost all paintings that I do, there's underlayers of colours and hues and other things that weren't quite right....if you'd get to see it layer by layer, you'd see a quite different painting. Alot of artists are like this, too...not to mention that you always have to paint the background first, so there's a little overlap, just due to it needing the 3D effect, or a sense of background/ foreground (ie: you never paint the foreground first, unless you want it to look unnatural). In that sense, recording has alot of parallels with painting--do the basic tracks first (background), and then put your foreground on top of it.

Mixing sounds is alot like mixing colors and hues--sometimes you need it lighter or darker, plus you also need a sense of arrangement and general direction after the colors, themselves, have been mixed. The only difference is that generally, painters and artists do everything themselves, their vision comes straight out of their head. Contrast that with the recording/ mixing routine which (asides from a few artists) generally has someone supervising or making suggestions. In an idealistic world if every artist produced, recorded and mixed their work, they'd draw alot of parallels to buying their blank canvas (tape, hard drive, etc), laying out and arranging the visual ideas (writing, recording), and then mixing the colors and hues (mixing audio).