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Since trading in his life as a successful musician,David Pensado [pictured left] has forged a repu-tation as a mix engineer of the highest calibre.Among his credits are records by Destiny’sChild, Christina Aguilera, Coolio, Sisqo, Jessica

Simpson, Mel C, Boyz II Men, Tevin Campbell, JanetJackson and Brian McKnight, and has recently beenenjoying chart-topping success with his mix of LadyMarmalade – the first single from Moulin Rouge’s sound-track, featuring the vocal contributions of Aguilera, MissyElliot, Pink, Mya and Lil’ Kim.

Having previously worked on Christina Aguilera’seponymous debut album, as well as on the productions ofRockwilder, Missy Elliot and, for the past 11 years, RonFair [pictured to the right of Christina Aguilera], it wasn’tsurprising that Pensado was asked by these three co-producers to mix their hip hop-flavoured remake of thePatti LaBelle classic.

Diva CityRB: The recording features five vocalists. What wereyou presented with?DP: Well, there were lead, backing and ad lib tracks byeach of the four principals – Mya, Kim, Christina and

Pink – and then there was Missy doing little sweeteningthings like “yeah”, “mm-hm” and so on, which I madesound like a radio voice and scattered throughout thesong. Then, at the end of the song, you actually hearMissy calling out everybody’s names.

But all up I had probably 40 or 50 vocal tracks. Theywere recorded pristinely – the whole recording waspristine – but when you’ve got that many tracks the diffi-culty of mixing is having to spend between 500 to 600minutes listening to all of them.RB: Were you making hand-written notes?DP: Well, that’s why it becomes difficult, because in orderto mix you’ve got to have all of the elements in your headso that you can pick and choose. If you don’t, then you’renot doing a great job as a mixer. In this case it took me aday just to memorise what I had.

Putting Flesh On The BonesRB: So along with the instrumental tracks on top of thevocal tracks, how did you work your way through allthe material?DP: Like any mix I do, I built my own outline mix thatlets me know my major elements and what I’m reallytrying to sell. With this particular song I had some of the

Mixing Lady MarmaladeDavid Pensado’s mixing credits read like a US top 20. Richard Buskin gets a blowby blow account of how to mix perfect pop.

MixingLady Marmalade

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best female singers working today as wellas one of the top five producers – Rock-wilder is just at the top of his game – sowhat I tried to do was outline the shapeswithout colouring them. On a normal songthat usually takes me about an hour, to anhour and a half, but on this song it took meabout a day and a half. And, to compoundmatters I didn’t have all of the vocals whenI started. I had the bulk of them, but I wasstill getting ad libs as I was mixing.

Having built my little skeleton mix I thenknew the sonic direction that I wanted. Iknew the main part just had to be in yourface, I knew the cowbell had to be in yourface, I knew the kick and snare had to hurtyou. I had such strong singers that, if anyelement in the mix sounded wimpy, theywouldn’t be getting the right support. Itherefore needed an aggressive track tosupport the aggressive vocals, and at thesame time I also wanted each singer tohave her own unique space. I didn’t wantthe song to sound the same from start tofinish – so you’ll notice some sectionswhere the cowbell is louder, for example.Meanwhile, every chorus that follows asinger, her vocals are the loudest in thatbackground section, and then at the end Ijust let everybody go for it. There are a lotof subtle things like that which were verytime consuming, but when you know you’regoing to have that kind of high profilerecord it’s fun to do that type of stuff,partly to show off and partly to enhancethe song.RB: So you’ve got your outline, andrough shapes drawn in, what next?DP: I then started to add broad swatchesof colour – the backgrounds and the mainparts – while for the little detailed parts Ihad nuances on organ, guitar and percus-sion which allowed me to tailor eachsection to the personality of the singer. Ifyou were dressing for a formal event, thoselittle things would be like your handker-chief, your cufflinks and your cummerbund.The main elements of the song prettymuch flowed from start to finish, and theonly elements I had to work with in orderto provide scene changes every eight barswere those little accents.

I wanted the song to be somewhat like asledgehammer and not too finessed, whileat the same time repeated listenings wouldaccustom you to the hard elements andenable you to discover the finessedelements. I didn’t want the finessedelements up front, like they would be in a

ballad. I knew the song would get alot of airplay, and so I wanted stuffin there that you could discover thetwentieth time around.RB: But mainly you wanted toblow people away with it.DP: Yes, the first time you heard it Ijust wanted you to go, ‘Damn it, thatsnare and kick are loud. Man, I neverknew Pink could sound like that’. Iwanted people to have that initialreaction, and then after they’d seenthe video and had those imagesburned into their brain, they’d beinterested in listening to the song andhave something to sustain thatinterest. One of the things I like doingas a mixer is having different layerslike that, where you can hear it andgo to different depths. A lot of peoplewho listen to my records don’t pickup on the extra layers and the sub-tleties, and that’s okay because I’vegot plenty there to hit them over thehead with, but I think the ones whotake the extra time to look for thatstuff find that it’s worth it.RB: You’ve used a SSL 9000J forthis mix. What role does a consolelike that have to play in theseaims?DP: Given that the automation ofthat console is probably the mostintuitive and user-friendly of any I’veever run across, it really helped meto blend the vocals. The 9000 allowsme to be somewhat chameleon-like,where I can tailor my mix to the par-ticular producer style or artist style,so I’m not limited to one or two orthree configurations. I knew theproducers liked a sound that wasn’tall digital and not all analogue. Also,if I have to stop and think about aconsole then I’m affecting my cre-ativity, but the beauty of the 9000 isthat its technical sophisticationactually makes it simpler and lessintrusive in the creative process.

Dynamic HypnoticsRB: Having put together most ofthe song’s elements, what did youdo next?DP: Well, then I had to build in thedynamics. In other words, I didn’thave the luxury of having a drummerpush the choruses or a guitar playergetting happy and loud. Every kick

Mixing Lady MarmaladeMixingLady Marmalade

drum and every snare was recorded at the exact samelevel, and so what I did was to add some other kicks andsnares of my own that helped me to change the tonalqualities of the drums as the song progresses. I put eachkick and snare at its own level as if I was playing it live.

The kick drum that I received from Rockwilder wasincredible, but I just felt like I could use that extra octavebelow what he gave me – that sub which vibrates yourbody. So, I added that component, and I felt that I couldget a little more attack, like the sound of a live drummer.If you think about it, in a liveperformance, the harder thedrummer hits the kick drum,the more attack you hear, soin the choruses I raised theattack a bit to give theimpression that the drummerwas hitting harder, providingthat thud which makes youso angry when it comes froma car that pulls up next toyou at the traffic lights. I hadto have that, and the samething applied to the snaredrum and some of the otherpercussion elements.RB: So obviously youbelieve that dynamicvariation is important to amix?DP: Hearing and vision areinterpreted somewhat thesame way by the brain. Ifnothing ever changes in yourliving room, everything staysin exactly the same place,you never notice anythingthere. But if after a yearsomeone moves a lamp from one table to another you’llimmediately notice that lamp. Well, what happens with alot of synthesiser and drum machine-based music is thatby the end of the song you’re not noticing things like youshould, so a lot of times I’ll just move a lamp from onetable to another and it’ll catch your ear and sustain yourinterest. The musical equivalent is to just turn up a drumfor one hit or crank up a guitar or keyboard part for onelick.

That’s one of the reasons why hip hop music works sowell. When we hip hop we’re not trying to make a smoothpiece of music – we’re letting all of the little warts jumpout. That has a tendency to sustain your interest, becausethere’s always furniture moving around in the living room.On a song like Lady Marmalade it was imperative to keepmoving things around. If you listen to that song, there’snot a lot at the end that you didn’t hear in the first chorus,so the way to sustain the interest is to constantly keepthose levels moving around, and then your ear won’t hearit as a nuisance but as “Wow, that’s cool. I never heardthat cowbell before.”RB: How much did you rely on effects and processing

to differentiate the vocals?DP: Well, I like bringing a vocal up on three or fourfaders. One fader will put the information through a realhi-tech chain – so I’ll be using all plug-ins on that particu-lar fader. Then I’ll take the same exact vocal and run itthrough an all-tube chain, so when my singers get kind ofloud and shrill and screechy I’ll pull up the fader that hasrich harmonics on the tube stuff; while on the breathy, softparts of the singing I’ll pull up the fader with the hi-techstuff. Sometimes I’ll also pull up both. I’ll just sit there

with different combinationson these faders, and eachword will have its owncharacter and flavourdepending on what I thinksounds best. Then I’ll takemy effects, like reverbs anddelays and choruses, andthose are on separate faders,so each word will have itsown individual effects.

In fact, I’ll take differentparts of the frequencyspectrum and put effectsonly on those. So, forexample, instead of puttinga chorus across the wholevocal, I’ll only chorus every-thing from, say, 10k up. Thatkeeps the mud out, and thenin the mid-range I might puta nice reverb, and only putthe delay on, say, the 1k to3k range. That way, insteadof getting cloudy mud andmy effects swirling all overthe place, I’m getting onlythe best elements of the

frequency spectrum for each effect. I’ve found that givesme a little more space and clarity in the mix, and psycho-acoustically it gives me more width than I could get byapplying effects to the entire spectrum. I not only do thatwith vocals, but also with drums, percussion, keyboardsand stuff like that.

Outboard motoringRB: So, what outboard gear did you employ in the mix?DP: On the vocals I used a combination of the FilterBankP6 plug-in, Wave C4, DSP MC2000 and Waves de-esserson one chain; gates, tube compressors and TeletronixLA2As on another chain, as well as the Fairchild emulatoron the CompressorBank. I used the real thing [vintageFairchild compressor] on Christina’s vocal and I actuallyliked this better. For Pink and Maya I also used the SSL9000J’s equalisers. Otherwise, for effects on the vocals Iused the Eventide Orville and Eventide 2016 ‘StereoRoom’, as well as the ‘Silica Beads’ program on theLexicon 480L. I also love the old Lexicon 300 reverb unitand the TC Electronic M3000.

For this project I also used the EMT 251 [plate reverb]

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presets, and what I did was kindaneat… Rather than bring a lot ofmy reverbs back on the console instereo, I used two differentversions of the same program. So,for one program I brought backboth sides hard left, the otherprogram I brought back hard right,and I altered the internal parame-ters of each program a little bit sothat it gave me a greater width. It’sactually like two monos, but of thesame program, and that’s a reallycool trick which I don’t hear a loton the radio. On backgroundvocals I used the Avalon 2055parametric EQ and a $50 piece ofgear called a Boss EH50… Just hit the button ‘Expansion2’ – don’t ever put it on anything else! It’s just a great boxfor the money, and it enabled me to take off the top endto send to the chorus.RB: And what about the drums and percussion?DP: On the kick drum I used a Pultec EQ. I parked onefrequency on 6k at about 5dB, and I parked the otherfrequency on 10k at about 5dB. I also tapped off a pieceof the kick and ran it through a dbx 160XT compressor atabout a 4:1 ratio, and it compressed the crap out of it.Then I restored the high end and low end which I lostfrom that, basically giving me a thuddy sound, and Imixed a little bit of that back in with the original sound toprovide the mid-range punch. I also used this old LTSound CLX compressor to really squeeze the crap out ofthe kick drum, and all that came through was a little highfrequency tick sound. I edited that back in to help yourear find the kick in the mix.

To the snare I did something similar. I used a little bit ofboard compression, and then I tapped off a piece of thatand ran it through a dbx 160XT and a VacRac TEQ1,adding some 12k and some 3k, and edited it back in withthe snare. (The compressors are always preceding theEQs on my snares and kicks.) Meanwhile, on the bass Iused an old Moog parametric equaliser that I bought 10years ago for 50 bucks, and then I ran that into an[Empirical Labs] Distressor on which I used the opticalsettings, basically emulating an LA2A.

For percussion stuff I like little tight delays, runningtheir output through a SPL Spatializer which brings thedelay back outside the plane of the speaker. So if, say, I’vegot a little bongo hitting in my left speaker, I bring thedelay back to the right and that delay is coming backeven wider than the speaker itself. On the other hand, fora lot of the keyboards, if it’s a pad or a string sound I’llbring them back through an Edison made by Behringer;an incredible piece of gear that widens the image but stillgives you a good mono. Sometimes in ProTools, if I’vegot a good stereo track that I want to keep stereo, I’ll shiftthe left side forward four or five milliseconds and shift theright side backwards four or five milliseconds. That givesme a real nice delay. I’ll vary that amount so that differentparts end up at different widths outside the speaker, and I

always maintain mono compatibility.On some of the percussion I used

an old Roland SRV2000, while onkeyboards I used board compres-sion and board EQ, and on the bassfor Lady Marmalade I used a RolandDimension D – a little trick whichwe use on that is to push in all fourpresets (you’re not supposed to beable to do that, but it works and itsounds great). Another cool littleeffect that I used on the bass was aZvex Seekwah guitar pedal.Basically, you’ve got eight taps on awah-wah that you can preset anyway you want. So as the signaldecays then each part of the decay

goes to a different wah, and you can have control overhow many of those taps you want to use and how fast itgets to it. For the bass I also used an old club box calledthe dbx 120X, while on the guitars – even though theywere synthesised – I used an old Korg A1 [multi-effectsprocessor] because I like its spring reverb settings, as wellas a dbx 163 compressor which I love because it has justone knob that says ‘More’! On acoustic guitars I used theEnsoniq DP4 – the preset was ‘Big Acoustic Guitar’ – andas for the cowbell, I used the Lexicon PCM70 ‘TiledRoom’.

Finally, I used Emagic’s Sound Diver to control all ofmy effects. Rather than sit there and go through 25 or 30pages on a unit’s menu, you can see the whole effect atone time, and that is just a godsend on something like theDP4.

Luvvies Are Lovely?RB: In summary, what was the biggest challenge of thisparticular project?DP: The pressure of dealing with so many personalitiesand movie deadlines. Imagine five artists, five managers,three producers and all of the movie people… It wasincredibly difficult, but I was blessed to have producerswho were very generous and very trusting. Ron Fair woreseveral hats – he was the A&R guy and the recordcompany president as well as the co-producer – but hefelt that unless he had each girl’s total blessing on the mixhe wasn’t going to put it out. So, we had each of themcome by, listen, give their opinions and finally theirapprovals before we proceeded. Fortunately, they couldonly critique their own parts.

The whole process with Pink took maybe 30 minutes;Christina had some very definite suggestions about effectsand actual syllables, and we finished with her within anhour; Mya had some harmonies and different parts that shewanted us to amplify, and so we spent about an hour withher; Lil’ Kim took about 30 minutes; and Missy approved itby phone. So, the process wasn’t that bad in terms of theartists’ professionalism. Managers, on the other hand,sometimes need crises to solve in order to look important,but that’s another story...!

“A lot of peopledon’t pick up on theextra layers and the subtleties, and

that’s okay becauseI’ve got plenty thereto hit them over the

head with”

AT