perception is reality

While I am in the vein of psychological mixing. . .

I once was doing one of my part time gigs at a church over a period of several months. Before they had asked me, I had already set up a weekend thing with another church so I had the church use a friend of mine for that one weekend that I was pre-booked. I call my friend after the weekend was over and she told me that everything went well, no issues.

The following weekend, I asked the music director and Pastor what they thought of my friend's mixing because I was hoping to get her this gig on a more permanent basis. They both responded that they had got comments about not hearing the violin enough.

So I called my friend back asking about the violin specifically and she told me what I already knew. The player doesn't play much and when they played it wasn't very good. So she never really brought the violin up much in order to make a better mix.

There in lies the difference between what I did instinctively and what she didn't do.

Once I got to thinking about it, I realized that I never really used the player much either due to the exact same reasons. But, I would try to find at least once during the service and push the violin forward for even a short period of time. I did it because, knowing church politics, I didn't know who's kid this player was and if I would offend someone of value (read: monetary value) by not letting them hear the violin at all.

So think about it. They loved my mixing because I found maybe 30 seconds or less where the player sounded halfway decent and let the audience hear it pronounced but didn't like her mixing because she didn't - yet technically her mix may have been better by not subjecting the audience to the sub-par music.

Even though I had the violin up for an extremely short period of time, if someone was asked, "Did you hear the violin?", they would answer. "Yes." They didn't realize that the amount of time but the fact that they did hear it. This ties into the old coaching trick of telling the players in the huddle the most important thing last before they go back into the game.

Something to keep in mind when doing contract gigs. And interesting when thinking about people's perception of what we do and how their needs may not line up with what is actually the best thing technically.