Lessons from Rich Keller Mixing Miles Davis Electric Band at SFJazz

Quick Answer

How do you mix a live recording?

Start by auditing the session for bleed, phase issues, and missing or damaged tracks before touching a single fader. Set static levels to feel the balance first. Use compression to tame dynamics without killing the energy. Let the music breathe: your job is not to reinvent the performance, it's to make it sound as powerful on record as it felt in the room.

Introduction: When the Session Arrives and Nothing Is Clean

Pro Tools session for mixing a live recording — Rich Keller mixing Miles Davis Electric Band at SFJazz

You open the session. Forty tracks. A live room. Bleed on everything. A mic that got knocked out of position mid-show. Fader rides someone baked into the recording before it ever reached you.

This is not a studio mix. This is a live recording, and it requires a completely different headspace.

When Grammy-associated mixing engineer Rich Keller was handed the multitrack files from the Miles Davis Electric Band's concert at the San Francisco Jazz organization (SFJazz), the brief was simple: take this live performance of Jean-Pierre and make it sound like a record. What followed is one of the most instructive live mixing sessions ever documented, a masterclass in problem-solving, philosophy, and knowing when not to reach for a plugin.

This guide breaks down the full process of mixing live recordings, using Rich Keller's session as the ultimate real-world reference. Whether you're mixing a jazz ensemble, a rock show, or a live broadcast session, the principles here apply across every genre.

What Makes Mixing Live Recordings Different

Before diving into technique, it's critical to understand why live mixing is a fundamentally different discipline from mixing in the studio.

In the studio, each instrument is recorded in relative isolation. Bleed is managed. Performances can be comped. You have control over every variable.

In a live recording, everything bleeds into everything else. The drummer's kit lives in the piano mic. The bass is in the overhead. The room is in all of it. You cannot undo this, you can only work with it.

The other key difference: the performance already happened. Your job is not to produce the music. It is to serve what was captured. As Rich Keller puts it:

The parts are already here. The job is to make it clear and let you feel the emotion of what's going on.

This distinction between creative mixing and functional mixing is the mental foundation everything else is built on.

The 7 principles of mixing live recordings — mixing engineer guide by Puremix

Step 1: Audit the Session Before You Touch Anything

The first thing Rich Keller did when he received the SFJazz multitrack was not reach for a plugin. He watched. He listened. He inventoried.

What to look for during a session audit:

- Which tracks are usable and which are not (a mic behind an amp, a track with only bleed, a broken signal)
- Which mics are conspicuously missing (in Rich's case: no hi-hat mic on an 11-minute jazz fusion track: an immediate red flag)
- Whether fader rides or gain changes were baked into the recording at the board
- Whether the session contains overdubs added after the fact
- The overall dynamic shape of the performance: where are the peaks, where are the quiet moments, how wide is the range

In Rich's session, he discovered that the room mic overheads had been pushed during the live show, creating unnatural swells in the recording. He found three tom mics that had captured zero tom hits (only snare bleed) so he muted them. He found a guitar mic that had been knocked out of position, making it unusable. He also found stereo keyboard overdubs added post-concert by the keyboard players.

None of these decisions involved a plugin. The audit is where you protect the mix before it starts.

Step 2: Set a Static Balance First

Before any processing, build a raw static mix: just faders, no plugins. This tells you what you're actually working with and prevents you from over-processing to compensate for a balance problem.

Rich Keller's approach is to use trim plugins as a second fader layer. This gives him a safety net: if he builds a rough balance he likes while exploring the session, he doesn't lose it when he starts committing to a mix direction. The trim preserves his initial feel while he works on top of it.

Key principle: If you feel the urge to ride a fader constantly, the problem is not automation, the problem is that the overall level of that instrument is wrong. Fix the level, then let the performance's natural dynamics do the work.

Step 3: Manage Bleed Strategically. Don't Fight It

Bleed is the defining challenge of every live recording. Every open microphone is capturing every instrument in the room to some degree. The instinct is to gate everything and carve it out. This is almost always the wrong move.

Rich Keller's bleed philosophy:

Bleed is inherent in any of these mics. Don't try to gate it. The best I could do was: when there is no instrument playing, I just turn off that mic.

His approach is surgical muting rather than heavy gating. If the timbales player doesn't play for two minutes, the timbales mic gets turned off for those two minutes. This keeps the session clean without the artifacts that aggressive gating introduces on a live recording.

The video reference technique:

Rich had access to the concert video, and he used it as an active mixing tool throughout the session. If he could see a percussionist playing in the background but couldn't hear them in the mix, he went and found that track and brought it up. The visual reference told him what the audience experienced and that became his North Star for balance decisions.

This technique is underrated and underused. If you have any video reference for your live session, use it.

Step 4: Solve the Drum Mix: Even When You're Missing Mics

Drums are the engine of any live recording. They set the energy, the groove, and the dynamic ceiling of the whole mix. They are also the most difficult element to control when the recording is imperfect.

The Missing Hi-Hat Problem

In Rich Keller's session, there was no dedicated hi-hat microphone. On a jazz fusion track built around the drummer's right hand, this was a critical problem. The hi-hat drives the groove. Without it, the rhythmic momentum of the entire track disappears.

His solution: compress the overheads heavily.

The overheads captured everything, cymbals, hi-hat, room energy. By pushing the overhead compression significantly further than he normally would, Rich was able to bring the hi-hat up to a level where it felt present and musical in the mix, even without a dedicated mic. He then EQ'd carefully to keep the overheads from becoming harsh or trashy at those compression levels, targeting a crystalline, clear sound that matched what he saw on screen.

The lesson: A missing mic is not the end of the world. Ask what adjacent microphone might contain the signal you need, and use processing to bring it forward.

Kick Drum Phase Checking

With two kick drum mics (a beater head mic and a front mic), Rich's first step was a phase check. He flipped the phase on one mic and listened, near total cancellation, confirming that the two mics were very close to out of phase with each other. Flipping back restored full impact.

Never blend two mics on the same source without checking phase first. This is true in the studio, and it's critical in live recordings where mic placement was not under your control.

The Drum Bus: Knock + Metric Halo

Rich used the Knock plugin by Infected Mushroom on his full drum bus, not just the kick. His reason: Knock delivers punch, saturation, and clip in a single plugin, giving him tonal shaping and dynamic control in one move. He combined this with the Metric Halo channel strip for transparent compression and a slight EQ push.

The result: a drum bus that felt full and powerful without sounding over-produced, which is exactly what a jazz fusion live recording requires.

Step 5: Build the Bass: Control First, Then Tone

Rich's bass treatment followed a clear two-stage philosophy: compress to control, then use the amp sim to add character.

He started with a blend of the bass DI and the bass mic. Classic starting point. Then he added an LA-2A to smooth out the dynamic articulations and clicky transients, the natural byproduct of an aggressive live performance. The LA-2A brought the signal into a more manageable range.

Then came the UAD SVT Pro a simulation of the Ampeg SVT bass amp rack unit. This was the game-changer. The amp sim added warmth, presence, and weight that a DI signal simply cannot provide on its own.

Rich's compression-before-EQ philosophy:

I usually compress before EQing. I want the compression to put things in a corral, control the environment dynamically first, then I'll EQ and push that into the mix.

This sequencing matters. If you EQ a dynamic signal first, you're EQing every dynamic extreme (the quiet notes and the loud ones) differently. Compress first, then EQ a more consistent signal.

Step 6: Treat Lead Instruments with Surgical Precision

Trumpet

The trumpet in Rich's session had a high-frequency edge, a sawtooth-like character that appeared when the player moved up in register. A broadband compressor would have killed the presence of the instrument. Instead, Rich used a multiband compressor targeted specifically at that frequency range, letting him tame the harshness without touching the body of the sound.

He also used the Greg Wells AcousticMe plugin as his primary insert: a gentle, musical processor that added warmth and low-mid focus to keep the trumpet forward and present without it ever becoming piercing.

Saxophone

Two mics, two very different positions: one near the bell, one near the player's hands. Rich blended them together and used the "Unplugged" plugin for acoustic instrument processing. No overthinking. The blend of two perspectives created natural depth without phase manipulation.

Guitar

A single usable mic (the second was unusable). CLA Guitar plugin for compression and presence, and a light high-pass on the sub bus at 200Hz to remove muddiness, applied gently, not as a brick wall, to let the guitar retain some low-end weight.

Step 7: Build the Master Bus Last, Not First

Rich's master bus chain was built after the full mix was in place. This is how it should work on a live recording, you need to hear the full picture before you know how much glue you need.

His master bus chain:

1. SSL bus compressor*: 4:1, sidechain high-pass engaged to prevent the kick from pumping the compressor. Approximately 60% wet/dry blend, with 2-3dB of gain reduction catching the hardest snare hits.
2. Gold Clip: subtle clipping for weight and saturation in the low and low-mids. Barely touching the threshold, but adding smoke to the overall picture.
3. Serban Ghenea-endorsed saturation plugin: additional harmonic density and tonal color.
4. God Particle (Jaycen Joshua): the final glue. Rich's description is the most honest endorsement you'll hear: "It never makes anything sound bad." Used here for its low-mid compression curve and final limiting, with a slight tilt adjustment (a roll-off at the bottom and a lift in the mids) to focus the overall tone.

The result:

A live jazz fusion recording that can stand next to a studio album release, not just a broadcast concert stream.

The Before/After: Why This Matters

Audio waveform before and after processing — mixing live recording techniques

Rich included a comparison between the original broadcast TV mix (done by a television engineer in the style common to live broadcast mixing) and his finished record-ready version.

The original mix was functional. Balanced. Appropriate for TV.

Rich's version had impact. Groove. Dynamic range that breathed and swelled. A bottom end that hit. The brass cut through without harshness. The piano sat in the pocket. The percussion was felt, not just heard.

The difference was not the tools. It was the philosophy: mix the music, not the session.

Checklist: How to Mix a Live Recording

Use this before your first fader move.

Session Audit

- Identify and mute all tracks with no usable signal
- Flag any tracks with baked-in fader rides or board automation
- Note any missing mics and plan which adjacent mics can compensate
- Check for post-show overdubs and document where they sit in the arrangement
- Watch / listen to any video or reference mix available

Phase & Routing

- Phase-check all multi-mic sources (kick, bass, piano, overhead pairs)
- Set up your subgroup routing before processing begins
- Use trim plugins as a second fader layer for non-destructive level management

Drum Mix

- Build the kit from the inside out: kick → snare → overheads → room
- If a key mic is missing, identify the adjacent mic that captures the signal
- Use the overhead compression to compensate for missing close mics where needed
- Check kick phase before blending beater and front mics
- Apply drum bus processing last, after individual tracks are treated

Instrument Treatment

- Compress before EQing on dynamic instruments (bass, brass, vocals)
- Use amp sims on DI bass signals: they add character a DI alone cannot
- Use multiband compression on lead instruments with uneven frequency response
- Apply strategic muting on percussion mics when the instrument is not playing
- Reference the video if available: hear what you see

Master Bus

- Build the master bus after the full mix is in balance
- Sidechain high-pass your bus compressor to prevent low-end pumping
- Use a clipper for weight and saturation before the final limiter
- Compare your mix to the original recording at matched levels before printing

FAQ: How to Mix Live Recordings

Live jazz performance on stage — mixing live recordings for record release

What is the biggest challenge when mixing a live recording?

Bleed. Every open microphone in a live environment captures some signal from every other instrument in the room. The solution is not aggressive gating — it's strategic muting when instruments are not playing, and accepting that bleed is part of the live sound.

How do you deal with a missing microphone in a live session?

Identify which adjacent microphone captured some of the missing signal, then use compression and EQ to bring that signal forward. In Rich Keller's Miles Davis session, there was no hi-hat mic — so he heavily compressed the overheads, which did capture the hi-hat, to bring the groove driver of the track to the front.

Should you use gates on live recordings?

Rarely, and with caution. Gates work well in controlled studio environments. On live recordings with heavy bleed, aggressive gating causes unnatural artifacts and chops off the natural reverb and room sound that makes a live recording feel alive. Muting inactive tracks manually is almost always preferable.

What is the correct mix philosophy for a live recording?

Serve the performance. Your job is not to reimagine or improve the music: it is to make the listener feel what the audience felt. This means preserving dynamics, maintaining the energy of the performance, and avoiding over-processing that turns a live recording into something that sounds like it was made in a studio.

How do you handle phase on a live recording?

Phase-check every multi-mic source before blending. Flip the phase on one mic and listen: if the sound gets thinner or nearly disappears, the mics are close to out of phase. Flip back and you'll hear the full combined signal. This is non-negotiable on kick drums, bass (DI + mic), and any stereo mic pairs.

What compression settings work best on a live recording drum bus?

There is no single answer, but the principle is: use more compression than you think you need, because the missing close mics (hi-hat, room, sometimes toms) require the bus compression to do the work of presence and glue that those mics would have provided. A moderately fast attack, medium release, 4:1 to 6:1 ratio, with a sidechain high-pass to prevent kick pumping, is a reliable starting point.

How is mixing a live recording different from mixing a studio recording?

In a studio recording, each element is captured in relative isolation with controlled acoustics and repeatable performance. In a live recording, everything bleeds into everything, the performance is a single take, and technical imperfections (positioning, level automation, mic issues) are baked into the files. The mixer's job shifts from creative shaping to problem-solving and preservation.

What plugins are most useful for mixing live recordings?

Any tool that gives you control without adding obvious character: transparent compressors (Metric Halo, LA-2A for smoothing), multiband compressors for frequency-specific dynamic control, amp simulations for DI sources (UAD SVT Pro for bass), and a well-chosen master bus glue compressor. The God Particle is Rich Keller's recommendation for final glue on a live mix. Avoid heavy saturation, pitch processing, and anything that adds an artificial character not present in the original performance.

Summary: The 7 Principles of Mixing Live Recordings

1. Audit before you process. Know what you're working with before you touch a fader or load a plugin.
2. Serve the performance. You are not the artist. Your job is to make what happened in the room feel real on record.
3. Manage bleed with mutes, not gates. Turn off mics when instruments aren't playing. Don't let automation artifacts destroy the natural room sound.
4. Solve missing mics creatively. An adjacent mic, heavy compression, and careful EQ can compensate for a missing close mic in most cases.
5. Check phase on every multi-mic source. No exceptions. A phase issue destroys low-end impact and clarity before any processing can help.
6. Compress before EQ. Control the dynamic environment first, then shape the tone.
7. Build the master bus last. You can't know how much glue you need until the full mix is in balance.

Watch It in Action: Rich Keller Mixing Miles Davis Electric Band at SFJazz

Rich Keller mixing the Miles Davis Electric Band SFJazz concert session on Puremix Inside The Mix

Everything in this guide comes directly from Rich Keller's Puremix Inside The Mix series, where he opens his full Pro Tools session on *Jean-Pierre* — an 11-minute live recording from the Miles Davis Electric Band's SFJazz concert — and walks through every decision in real time.

Watch Rich Keller: Mixing SFJazz, Miles Davis Electric Band, Part 1
Watch Rich Keller: Mixing SFJazz, Miles Davis Electric Band, Part 2

How to Mix Live Recordings: The Complete Guide