Musical Telepathy?
Rick Beato recently interviewed Mike Elizondo, and they got to talking about sending mixes to other people for their opinion.
My favorite point came when Rick asked him, in reference to Mike sending mixes to Dr. Dre, 'Once you decide to do that, can't you just kind of get in his head and figure out what he's going to like and not like?'
Mike agreed completely.
This is something I've talked about here before. If you're in a band, for instance, and you're going to send something to the other members, and you know them well, you can pretty much predict what they're going to say.
You could have listened to that mix a thousand times, and you're still going to be able to make changes in reference to sending it to them that you wouldn't have made before. Then you make those changes, and then you send it.
I was doing this with Daphne Falls tracks, where I'm responsible for the drums and percussion, the bass, and kind of the synth lines.
I always put myself in the mindset of, okay, I'm sending this to Ana and Josiah. What are they going to say?
Then I do another listen-through and make new, real changes.
So for a while, yes, I do it for me and what I think would be cool. Then I stop, take a little break, get into their mindset, and listen through again.
Inevitably, that exposes some more stuff that needs to be adjusted, changed, or, typically in my case, completely trashed and done over.
It's amazing that you can do that.
Like I was talking about yesterday, it's got to be part of the collective unconscious. I just don't see how it's not.
Again, it's fascinating to communicate with people through music. Yes, the words matter. Yes, the music matters. But the combination of everything is communicating feelings.
I don't know anything else quite like that in the world.