(Blogtober Day 11)
Something that took me a while to really understand in sound design and mixing is how to find the restraint that is sometimes needed to not make everything loud all the time. It’s a super easy trap to fall into, and boy did I ever fall into it early in my career. Overtime I learned how to break a sound down into it’s parts and how to extract those from the resources I had available. But when it came to mixing that was a lesson that took longer. Eventually I finally realized the benefit of dynamics, peaks and valleys in a mix. In one sense, a kind of orchestration of the sounds.
The lesson that I think sent me on a good course when it came to developing a more solid mixing technique is identifying what element is the star of the mix at any given moment. While this seemed somewhat limiting to me at first, I soon realized how much creative liberty it actually creates. If you know what you are planning to feature in a mix then you also know what to pour your time and effort into. Also it allows you to really draw the audiences attention to things.
In these modern times we are even able to apply this style of mixing algorithmically with high dynamic range (HDR) systems. Which, to be honest, is an entire frontier of mix discovery that is pretty exciting to explore, and there certainly is a ton of untapped potential in that realm as well as well as potential in more intricate systems becoming available in the future to do the same but with more control and perhaps more easily implemented.
I know we are living in the world of AI everything these days, and I imagine there might be some opportunity to apply an AI model to sort of live mix a player’s game as they’re playing. I guess we’ll see what the future holds.