I've read a lot about how mixing engineers are often given very raw mixes to work with, with no effects on.
My doubt is... how much do we, the producers need to 'produce' if the mixing engineers are going to add the eq, compression, reverb etc.?
Imagine i'm making the drums for a track. How much do I manipulate each element? For example, the kick? Is it my job to shape its sound, adding eq and other effects, or is it for the mixer to do?
In my understanding, once I have my track laid out and complete, I should send it over to the mixer? Without any reverb or anything? Just completely dry?
It makes me wonder then how much a producer is responsible for the final sound. Anybody shed some light on this please?
There is no right and wrong, but there are definitely some different engineering approaches out there.
In my view recording a great production is your best chance of making a hit, so I want to know what is the quality of the recorded production and work my way up to a killer production/recording. During this phase I get the sound of the session player, the instrument and its signal chain and the room. My only rule is that must sound great in the context. So I tune it so that the arrangement in its context is captured to sound awesome.
You can spend a lot of time with the recording, but you should not spend too much time on that, spend more time on the song, the music and the arrangement, so that whatever is recorded, in whatever way, puts the bar high because of the music.
Overall, the more quality that is rooted in the sound sources, the room and the playing, the better. But the producer must also work on making these elements work in the context of the song and the arrangement, no matter how great they sound in solo. Obviously in order to have a great master at the end you also need these sound sources to pass through high quality signal chains. A producer must be focused on the song first of all, then the playing, then the tone of the playing - in that order, because that is by how much the frequency signature is set. A rock song and a ballad will produce totally different frequencies.
So creating a hit production is a lot rooted in mastering the art of music, much more so than mastering the art of engineering. But the tone of the playing is a big component in the final perception, so therefore you should spend time on what the recorded sound sources sound like, much more so than on the mixing and mastering. Having great sounding tones is a great differentiator once you have a great song and great playing. But great sounding tones does not help you much if the song and the playing is not producing great music. And then the mixing and mastering can be killer without doing much to the whole.
So focus on the song, the way the song is presented and the sound of that.
In terms of effects etc., that is part of the tone shaping process, because you shape the tones in the context. I would say you need at least dynamically stabilize the signal of the individual sound sources before mixing, but I think it is even better to implement the whole first stage of dynamics processing (instrument level) in the recording rather than in the mixing, using hardware effects. The "rough" mix of the recording should sound great.
Poor sounding recording rooms can really mess things up, don't underestimate the importance of the sound of the recording room.