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Listen Close is a weekly feature where I take a long hard listen to a song that really grabbed my ears. I think about which elements of the production have got me so interested and try to understand how and why they work, as well as how I can apply these techniques to my own productions  This week I’m investigating the song ‘Virile’ by Moses Sumney. This song was originally released as a single on the 14th of November 2019. It features as track four of the first part of the double album Græ, released in February 2020. I first heard it while listening to the whole of Græ after the second part of the album launched on May 15th 2020. Moses himself is listed as the producer, with a mix by Ben Baptie. For a full run down of the credits and the lyrics for this song, check out the lyric booklet here. For my in depth listening I purchased a 48k 24 bit .wav of the song from bandcamp, but you can easily stream to the song on Spotify or Apple Music. I have been listening to Græ a lot this past week and would definitely recommend taking an hour of your time to absorb it as one piece. It is a very musically diverse album, woven together in a way that makes it feel very cohesive. The production and mixing is fantastic throughout and I could have almost certainly picked any of its 20 tracks and found something fascinating to observe. But, as it happens, ‘Virile’ is the track that I find myself returning to again and again. This song is somewhat of an outlier on the album, it’s far denser and seemingly chaotic than most of the tracks and it just sounds huge. I love the swirling and dreamlike feel it produces with a real pulse of energy. Often a busy mix can end up feeling small or cramped, especially if a lot of elements are fighting for your attention, but this track totally succeeds in generating a sense of a size and undulating power. There are a number of ways Virile does this, but before considering any mix decisions, it’s important to acknowledge that the arrangement is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Virile contains a large number of instruments and parts, most of which you will recognise as pretty standard in western music; Piano, Harp, Strings, Flute, Electric Guitar, Electric Bass and a Drum kit. This is supplemented with some programmed drum parts, a low bass synth sound and some heavily affected versions of different string, flute and guitar parts that act as synth pads, filling out the range of sounds even further. All of this builds a vast soundscape around a dynamic vocal performance from Moses. These instruments are used to create a really thick and heavy sound, lurching forward around a dark and booming piano stab and tight grungy drumbeat. The variety of sounds gives the song a slightly overwhelming feeling on first listen, with the mix ostensibly adding to the madness as things move around the stereo field and rise and fall in volume all around you. Overall this is a very organic mix, even with the programmed drums and synths, everything has a certain ‘liveness’ to it. Despite all the moving parts, Virile still feels driving and focussed in its delivery. Within the apparent chaos, each instrument is confined to a fairly narrow register, and rarely do sounds in the same musical space fight for melodic attention. For example, harp, flute and violin all feature heavily throughout the song with a strong Hi-Midrange focused sound, but they rarely interact, other than to transition from section to section. This gives the mixer a big head start, as it’s reasonably clear from the arrangement which sound is important at any one time, especially in that key hi-mid area. The mix itself uses a few different tricks to push this arrangement into feeling larger than life. The most exciting for me is the treatment of the Piano part, entering at 00:09 and announces the start of the song properly. Immediately there is something unusual, as the sound is impossibly wide, feeling as if it’s outside the width of your speakers or headphones. This has been achieved with some sort of stereo widening technique, whether through mid/side manipulation or a dedicated processor. (Recently I’ve been relying on Waves S1 Imager for this task, but a quick Google of stereo widening plugins will give you plenty of options.) This sort of processing changes the phase relationship between the pianos Left and Right channels and this comes with a down side. When listening to the track in mono (through a phone or a Bluetooth speaker perhaps) this results in some cancellation of the sound, dropping its' perceived level quite a bit. In this case that’s a worthwhile trade-off for the impact it produces. Letting the low end of the track feel wide adds to the expansiveness of the sound and overall ‘size’ of the mix. Clearly aware of the potential issues with this decision, the producers have cleverly added a booming drum sample (from 00:27, can be heard in isolation at 00:49) that mimics the rhythm of the piano. This nicely fills in any missing low frequency content in mono and further emphasises its impact in stereo. Mono Listening
Checking your mixes in mono as you work can be a huge benefit. Even though we would love to imagine that everyone who hears our work is sat down in a comfy chair in front of a pair of studio monitors, or wearing their favourite open back headphones, the reality is that there are still a huge amount of places a track will be heard in mono or worse yet, just the left or right channel (for those in denial about this, picture a couple sharing a pair of earpods on the bus or someone playing a song from youtube on their phone speaker). So it’s critical that we know what’s going on in these situations. Luckily is this really easy to do and many audio interfaces have a handy ‘mono’ button for just this purpose. But it can quickly be achieved inside a DAW by inserting a mono summing plugin as the last slot on our main output channel. Logic Xs’ own ‘Gain’ plugin is able to do this, and I’m sure most DAWs have an equivalent, but plugins such as Brainworxs’ free bx_solo can also be used to solo L and R channels independently. It also has a simple stereo width control that can give a similar effect to the piano in Virile! 
As the song progresses more and more elements are introduced. I really like how the Piano (and it’s accompanying boom) get to keep hold of their place as the lowest part of the mix. Once the drums and bass guitar arrive you might expect them to muscle in on the low end, but instead they are quite restrained at the sub end of the spectrum. This gives the track that rhythmic pulse, as the low end fills up at the start of each bar and relaxes as the piano decays. These impacts also cause the mix to hit its bus compression harder, tightening the mix as it compresses and relaxing as it releases. When I imagine what a live drum kit and bass amp sound like in the real world, they are powerful instruments. (Having been stood very close to both adjusting microphone positions during sound checks, this doesn’t take much imagination for me.) Here, the mix uses that expectation against us. Knowing that heavy drums and bass are kind of a psychological reference point for something big and loud, pushing the level of typically more delicate instruments like the strings and harp above the rhythm section tricks us into thinking that they are even bigger and louder. I love the way this song and its mix immerses me in its own strange and dreamlike world. The song takes us deep into a place where a piano can be all around us, string instruments can zip around as they are played and a harp is twice the size of a drum kit. The track opens with just Moses’ voice, in what feels like a fairly realistic room sound, central in the mix. This quickly resets our ears from whatever we have heard previously, whether that’s the previous track on the album or whatever was on our iTunes shuffle before hand. As the harp comes in, we are transported to the world of ‘Virile’, as Moses’ voice interrupts his previous vocalisation with a fuller sound that is pushed forward in the mix. A distinct slap-back delay on this new vocal (from 00:09, ‘hike through’) and the aforementioned Piano announce that we have arrived somewhere else. From here the mixer has free reign to introduce effects and movement. The song doesn’t easily fit into an established genre, so there’s no real expectation of things that should or shouldn’t be present, so long as nothing breaks the world that’s been established. In practical mix terms, this means that no one thing suddenly upsets the established tonal balance of the mix. Instead, interest and excitement is primarily kept up by automated volume and pan changes or one-off effects moments. Brief exceptions to this do make new elements exciting though. For example at 02:25 a scratchy guitar part on the left hand side momentarily takes midrange focus away from the vocal, and a subby bass synth replaces the piano part from 01:56 to 02:17. We are also fully pulled out from the established mix at 03:32. As the synths and reverbs die out, Moses’ voice is left exposed and without effects, giving us a breather from the more intense aspects of the production, before they slam back in at 03:39, exciting your ears all over again. This, along with the intro section, provide your ears with a reference point for just how interesting the soundscape gets. It ensures that you don’t totally stop paying attention once the song goes past the three minutes thirty that we typically expect a modern song to be. This mix does two of the things that I really love when listening to music. It provides a cohesive world and space for the song to live in and it has a unique sound within it that I had to know more about. For me this song really embodies the idea that mixing is a verb. Things are being done to the mix all the time as the production shifts around Moses’ vocal performance to demand attention and maintain interest. Stray observations
Further Listening If a 20 track long double album sounds a bit daunting, try ‘Two Dogs’ from Part 2 of Græ to get a sense of the very different places Sumney goes to. If the stereo widening featured on the piano here intrigued you, check out ‘Ultralight Beam' by Kanye West. The Gospel Choir in the choruses sound amazingly wide in stereo, but if you listen in mono they get sent to the very back of the room. Thanks for joining me for another Listen Close. I’d love to know what you think of this mix in comments below!
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