Production Profile: Mixing With Shirley

David Weiss visits power mixer Kevin Shirley at The Hit Factory in New York City as he crafts the latest release from Dream Theater.

You could almost smell the drama in the air at The Hit Factory, where world-class mixer Kevin Shirley was working with one of rock’s most demanding bands, Dream Theater. On the last day of mixing for the new CD, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, Shirley took time out from unweaving the complex maze of guitars, drums, bass, keyboards and vocals to talk. With his intense commitment to mixing, Shirley is the perfect complement to Dream Theater and their equally intense commitment to self-indulgence.

“The thing they require in their mixes is a lot of power, but they also want the finesse- hearing the details of each individual musician and his instrument,” Shirley explains. “(Drummer) Mike Portnoy has really busy feet, and he wants to hear everything in the kick drum. (Guitarist) John Petrucci wants to hear all of his notes: They all want to hear everything they’re playing all the time, which is about mixing. Relative to everything, mixing is one massive compromise. Dream Theater, however, requires more than the perfect compromise, because if that’s all you do, you can lose their power. It’s a matter of getting the power, the depth and creating a vocal space — creating a 3-D picture where everybody wants to be in front is hard to get.”

Shirley’s work with Dream Theater is the latest in a series of collaborations, following his turn as producer for the Falling to Infinity album and DVD and mixer for Scenes from a Memory. The result is a relatively smooth working relationship that has increased Shirley’s understanding of the band’s needs over time.

“I know what the guys want from each of their records, and I don’t go in trying to achieve anything other than what they want to hear — and to be honest, they don’t know what they want to hear,” Shirley says. “The guys are all such consummate musicians, they have a tendency to compose while jamming. They’ll write a piece of music and say, ‘this is the Pink Floyd section, this is the King Crimson section’, so you deal with those sections. (Keyboardist) Jordan Rudess has also brought a different thing to the band. He’s not so much a rock player; he’s brought more orchestration to Dream Theater, which they’ve ended up using very effectively.” Add in the fact that the band was constantly adding new source material to songs, even on the day of the mix, and it’s clear that Shirley has patience aplenty to manage a nonstop creative process that will probably continue on right through mastering.

When the time comes to pick where the faders go, however, Shirley gets the space he needs to work his own magic. “They leave me alone,” he says. “I just try and get to where I’m ultimately happy with the big picture, trying to get it as representative and powerful as I can. The biggest challenge is having definition on all the instruments, while still maintaining the big picture. I really attempt to let every musician have their say, so clarity of instruments is important. To be honest, I’m not a big listener of progressive rock, even though I’ve mixed a lot of progressive rock records. I’m more of a Zep-head than a Yes-head!”

A listen to the double CD and its 96 minutes of total running time shows that Shirley’s approach definitely works. Six Degrees stands out from the progressive pack with a clear, bright feel that feels worlds apart from the murky bottom ends that often characterize the genre. The result is an energy infusion and sense of space that supports the band’s hooks and ambitious arrangements from the beginning of disc one to the last breath of disc two.

Mixing on the Hit Factory’s SL 9000 J console, Shirley records all the tracks onto Pro Tools using Apogee converters, taking up two 72GB hard drives. “The 9000 J sounds great,” Shirley notes. “It’s very easy to use, and the bottom end is very solid. On the drums I’ve got the Empirical Labs Fatso compressor — it’s amazing; it just sounds great. Another very cool piece of gear to know about is the Peavey Kosmos: I’ve got all John’s guitars running through it, and it makes them sound fatter and wider.”

Dream Theater is just the latest project for Shirley, whose skills have been tapped by industry heavy hitters like Aerosmith, Iron Maiden, Silverchair, The Black Crowes and Journey. “There’s nothing I like more than mixing,” he says. “When something’s really well produced, it’s fun to mix, like a puzzle — back and forth, up and down. It’s very exciting trying to create those dimensions with power and energy.”

Shirley’s ears started developing at a young age, due in part to the troubled politics of his native South Africa. “Television was new in South Africa in the 1970s,” he recalls. “That was the way the government could keep information out of the hands of the public and keep the populace ignorant. It was how they kept apartheid running as long as they did. So I wasn’t interested in TV, and I’m still not. I like sonics.”

As his career developed, Shirley went from South Africa to Australia, then on to the United States for work with the likes of Bon Jovi, Rush and Billy Squier.” All that kept me starving, so I went back to Australia in 1995,” he says, “and produced a little-known band called Silverchair.” The platinum status of that A&R score pushed Shirley way back above the poverty line, and he moved back to the U.S. in 1997 to get back to business — a lot of producing and a little mixing.

Contrary to the MO of many working mixers, Shirley is not one to test out a mix in progress during the drive home. “I don’t listen to a project outside of the studio when I’m working on it,” he says. “Once I finish a mix, I don’t go home and check it out. That’s because I think if you find you have something intrinsically wrong with it, it’s not as easy as a quick fix — you can’t just say, ‘the snare’s too fat and I have to lift it.’ I would have to re-approach the whole thing and prepare to remix rather than update it. So when I’m in the studio, I’m confident I’ve gotten what I can out of it.”

Besides listening to his records, another one of Shirley’s creations worth checking out is his Web site at www.cavemanproductions.com, which is one of the most well produced personal engineer/producer/mixer sites out there. Aside from the usual discography, bios and press, Shirley updates his online diary on an almost daily basis. While he insists it hasn’t really helped his career; there’s no way it can be hurting his profile: Average traffic is around 200,000 visitors per month. “Producers have always had just a name and been the unseen, unheralded hero,” he points out. “What my site does is introduce the man behind the name. I think I’ve stripped away a lot of the mystique and given people the opportunity to like or dislike me apart from the music.”

You can press Shirley all you want for deeper secrets to his style, but he’s not one to give them up, mostly because he’d rather not analyze his own techniques too much. “Yesterday someone was listening and he said, ‘I don’t understand how you get it all in there and make it all sound big and loud.’” Shirley relates. “I don’t know how I do that. It’s just fine-tuning, there’s not a science — it’s just where you are. I know what I like to listen to, and I know the KRK 6000 speakers very well.”

While he may be a seasoned pro among mixers, there’s no doubt that Six Degrees served up plenty of welcome challenges for Kevin Shirley. “Yesterday’s song was pretty interesting,” he says in a big understatement. “It was 15 minutes long with five different drum kits. I had to make the thing sound seamless and effortless, going from a slow bluesy section to a Gabriel section to a Dave Matthews thing. I was like, ‘how do you make this sound like a band playing?’

“That’s what I do — just mix it. It was really difficult trying to make everybody play the same parts in the same register; get heard, and still make the song valid. It’s challenging for me, and it’s something I do willingly, even though it’s tiring. But I’m thrilled with the way it came out, and I have the best job in the world.”