You worked on that part for five weeks.
The room heard it
at a level chosen by a stranger
in the four minutes
before the second song.
That is not a complaint.
It is the arrangement
every live performance is under,
and most players
never think about it once.
There is a person at a desk
forty feet behind the crowd.
They have never heard your songs.
They arrived at four,
solved a room with nobody in it,
and are now solving
a different room,
full of bodies that absorb
everything above two kilohertz.
They are hearing a sum.
You are hearing your own hands,
plus whatever your monitor
is willing to tell you,
which is not the same sound
as the one being made
in front of the audience.
Nobody on stage
can hear the performance.
So the arguing starts.
You ask to be turned up,
which is a request
for everybody else
to be turned down,
made about a balance
you cannot hear,
in a language of decibels
nobody in the band uses honestly.
None of that moves the fader
that matters.
What moves it
is giving them something mixable.
Two instruments out of the same register
so a choice is not required.
Dynamics you play,
rather than dynamics
they have to construct.
A steady level across the set,
so the settings they find
in song two
are still true in song nine.
And a conversation before you start.
Which song is the quiet one.
Who takes the solo in the fourth.
Where the singer steps back.
Sixty seconds of information
that is otherwise discovered
halfway through,
too late to act on.
The wider version of this
has followed me everywhere.
Whoever handles your work last
decides how it lands.
The engineer, the editor,
the person who deploys it,
the colleague who presents it
in the meeting you were not invited to.
You can treat that person
as weather,
and take whatever they guess.
Or you can treat them
as the last member of the band,
and tell them what you meant.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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