I am going to be looking into Bruce Botnick for this weeks blog. He is most renown for operating as an engineer (and producer for L.A. Woman) on every album by The Doors and operating as producer on Forever Changes by Love.
I am picking Bruce Botnick as he has talked a lot about his experiences with mono, stereo and surround.
In an interview with Stephen Anderson of VMP, Bruce talks about mixing in mono and the benefits and limitations that come with it. He says ‘Being that AM radio was our only mode of getting it over the airwaves, mono was it. So we always mixed in mono and then would open it up into stereo.’ When I first read this I thought that he was implying that this was inherently a negative thing but he goes on to talk about the beauty of mono recording and compares it to watching a black-and-white movie where you’re not distracted by the colour. I had never thought of it this way and in a way he is right, there’s less to perceive and less space for the individual tracks to occupy and as such, will have to be mixed differently. He says that there’s nowhere to hide. Theres nothing coming out of the right. Theres nothing coming out of the left. There are no distractions. It’s just this image.(Anderson, 2021) I find that the opposite is true when mixing in surround and I can’t help but feel that a lot of surround mixes can leave certain parts sounding very isolated, most often the vocals. Through experimentation with dolby atmos in logic I have found a challenge in spreading out the parts without isolating them from one another. A lot of the beauty of a good mix is overlapping sounds and how they play off of each other and with surround it is very easy to entirely separate each sound around the audio field. Experimentation with this made me realise just how important it is to create a unique mix for each sound format.
“The mono and the stereo are two different animals. It’s the same music, the same echo chamber, same everything. But when you open things up, they do different things. It’s its own person, mono.”(Anderson, 2021)
Anderson, S. (2021) ‘let it happen’: Legendary Bruce Botnick on engineering ‘the doors’, Vinyl Me, Please. Available at: https://www.vinylmeplease.com/blogs/magazine/bruce-botnick-the-doors-interview (Accessed: 02 May 2024).