At Promaxdba in New York City, Jared Horowitz, a partner in Eggmen Sound, an audio design, mixing and music house in Brooklyn, told an audience that it is time to reverse a more than 20 year trend and bring sound mixers back to the creative table with producers, art directors and editors at the beginning of the production process.

“As a sound mixer,” Horowitz said, “I’ve often felt that I stood outside that special group of people who make the spots I work on. There’s the editor, the producer, the creative director and all the other people who came together to create the finished product. But by the time it got in front of me, for the most part, it was done.

“Most sound mixers today ‘sweeten’ the finished product,” he said. “I’ve never really cared for this term because it reveals the ultimate truth about what I am and what I do — a sweetener, not a creator.”

This is a recent phenomenon brought on by the adoption of computers in the audio mixing business. Back in the days of razor blade editing, mixers did their work first. “The computer radically changed the media landscape. To become more efficient, the TV networks began pushing editors to become all-in-one resources. This took place gradually over the years. Now, we have lost some of the magic in what we used to do.”

Horowitz then took the audience through some of the things that sound mixers can do to make commercials better at a lower cost. One is the pre-mix, an idea from the old days.

“This (video) is an example of the classic pre-mix. It is driven by emotion rather than plot. It has more music than pictures. Sometimes you need to strip away the pictures and let what you hear drive what you see. This is an award-winning classic done by Danny Feder. The audio is driving the picture and the sound bites are completely synced up with the music. It’s almost like a music video.”

A first edit pre-mix involves incorporating the mixer early in the process and allowing him to add the sound elements early in the process. “The most important part is to provide comprehensive splits, which allows the editor to take those splits and make revisions as he moves forward in the edit. He is therefore not married to the sounds before or after them. I always provide about eight tracks of splits just for the sound effects alone.”

Horowitz called the sound mixer’s work an “invisible” job that should be noticed only when something goes wrong. “No one thinks about the engineer who builds a building until it falls down,” he said. “Music edits fall into this category of invisible — yet they are awesome. If you notice a music edit, it’s probably not very good.”

Today’s sound mixers, he said, have a bag of tricks to make music edits no one will notice. That includes the addition of sound effects that not only cover edits but make the tracks jump out. Isolating the vocals is another trick. Vocals can be moved about, mingled with effects or buried completely.  And finally, mixers try to avoid anchoring, the phenomenon that happens when creatives get stuck on a sound effect they had heard from the beginning and become afraid to replace it.

Rather than compromise the sound once a spot is finished, Horowitz said he tries to sell his clients on collaborating with the sound mixer before the spot is produced. He said most agree, essentially never having thought of it before.

“Each project is unique and requires its own toolkit,” Horowitz said. “Brainstorming and trouble shooting in each situation is what makes our work truly collaborative. The main takeaway is not about specific techniques, but about changing the way that one uses audio and how it is integrated into the production process.

“As a client once said to me about this new thing I call collaborative audio: ‘It’s not really very complicated. People just don’t do it enough.’ I remind them that they don’t need to make the mixer king. But why not invite him to the table when the meal begins?”