Great Mixes per Robert Scovill

This one has been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time – since wrapping up last year’s Arts Conference.  I’m not sure why I’ve never posted it.  Seems like there’s some good stuff here so there you go…

Great mixes start with great sources. Period. Great engineers all have one common thread running through them – they all knew how to make sources sound right before they ever hit a microphone. Square pegs don’t fit in round holes. When was the last time you as the mixer stepped up on stage without the PA on to see what the sources were doing before you reached for the channel EQ? Great sounding sources can survive a bad mix, but bad sources can only be hidden, not helped, by a great mix.

Pro audio retailers & manufacturers have sold us on the “black box” mentality – there is always a black box to fix your problem. Churches have suffered terribly from this. Result of ignorance. Great mixes do not come from black boxes.

Anything that has an agenda that’s skewed from making the vocal present and intelligible is questionable – for church and out in the other world.

ARE EAR MONITORS & ELECTRONIC DRUMS REALLY THE ANSWER?

Robert’s perspective: when people are on stage performing and they see/hear each other and they see/hear you, there’s a connection that takes place there. The biggest downside to ears is disconnect with audience…can also disconnect with rest of the band.

The challenge with wedges is to get the stage balanced and sounding natural. Musicians have to play within themselves and can’t get greedy…must rely on the engineer to make sure the stage feels right. Bashing on the cymbals = must play a better kit mix.

Put up one mic in front of the kit and let the drummer listen to it to realize what they’re giving you…drummers need to give you a good kit mix. It starts with the source.

“Dude, I’ve got 112 PA speakers up there…I’ve got way more up there than you’ve got…so turn it down and I’ll put it back in the PA” Have to make them believe you’re their ally, not their enemy. Face to face on stage, not over the talkback, and not in front of other musicians.

Well Placed Exaggeration

From Robert Scovill’s live audio master class at Willow, a paraphrased pearl of wisdom:  great mixers enhance what’s happening…experience the music as you listen, let it talk to you musically, and enhance it as a MIX.

Live mixing is about well placed exaggeration.  Because it is an audio/visual experience, what you hear needs to match what you’re seeing.  On a recording, the audio doesn’t have to keep up with the visual at all – the visual is in your imagination.  But in live world, huge visual activity needs to match what you’re doing and seem like you’re working together with it.  For example, the spotlight hits somebody or a featured camera shot – your mix needs to change in level for whatever is featured.  When music comes back in, pull it back where it belongs.

Wireless Guitars

Among Mr. Skaff’s credentials are stints as Shania Twain’s FOH engineer throughout her several world tours.  Shania’s live show was always so unique because it was in the round, bare stage, heavily tracked, and everyone in the band minus drums were wireless.

I asked him for advice regarding the challenges to tone that come from a wireless stage since we can get such pushback from musicians on the degradation of their tone when we add a wireless transmit/receive path to their signal chain.  He suggested the most important thing for success is clear artistic vision from the producer.  In Shania’s show, that was Mutt Lange – everybody knew what Mutt wanted and it was assumed wireless was for the greater artistic good of the show.  Because of this, the guys in the band spent plenty of time in rehearsal dialing in their rigs so they could be wireless and still get what they needed for tone.

Is it as true as a cable between the guitar and pedal board?  Obviously not.  But it was refreshing to know that there was no magic smoking bullet I’ve missed to suddenly make wireless sound exactly like a cable.

The one piece of gear we’ve found at Kensington in the past 6 months that has made somewhat of a difference is the Radial Dragster.  If you ever do wireless guitars, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  From the Radial website, the Dragster restores the full rich tone you lose when you plug your guitar into a wireless transmitter or other types of buffered inputs like those of effects, mixers, sound cards or recorders.  Dragster’s exclusive Drag™ control makes passive pickups think (and sound like) they’re connected directly to a amplifier input by allowing you to precisely dial in the correct amount of impedance loading.  Result? Your guitar tone regains it’s warmth – it feels ‘right’ again and your performance sounds great!

While not perfect, this little thing makes a big difference in just about every case we’ve tried it with.

Is a flat PA the holy grail?

In tandem with coherence, can we finally put to rest the idea that our goal when tuning a rig is to have a “flat” PA?

Below is a graphic Chris Gille found on Wikipedia that shows the equal loudness contour graph.

If you flip it upside down as pictured, it shows the relative frequency response of our ears.

As you can tell, that response changes as the level of sound is increased and do you notice something?  Our ears don’t perceive sound “flat”!  Because of this, a flat EQ curve on a PA sounds awful because all you’re doing when going for flat is getting equal energy at all frequencies.

Rather than working for flat, Scovi suggests the more important “holy grail” is linear transfer.  The goal is to have linear transfer of audio from the desk through the sound system with as little coloration to the signal as possible.  What goes in is what comes out.

In order to achieve this, the RTA is NOT the right tool to use – all it does is measure energy.  The correct meter is FFT which generates a difference curve of the PA output as measured in the room to the output straight of out the console.  When you subtract 5 dB at 400 hz on a channel, you should hear 5 less dB of 400hz actually in the house.

Coherence

(WARNING: Major sound geek talk here.  Proceed at your own risk!!!!)

Robert Scovill spent much more time in the master class at Willow this year discussing his concept of coherence then he was able to in the Thriving class last year and it really resonated with me. This one seems to get progressively more difficult to wrap your brain around the more you think about it and try to implement into your room.

The core question is can two like signals be in polarity yet out of phase? We’ll stop here for a second so you can re-read that question a few times.

The answer is obviously yes! The answer to this question is found in signal to noise ratio. I’ve always thought of this in terms of evaluating gear – low noise floor, quiet, etc. But in the world of coherence, signal represents the sound you want to hear, noise is the sound you don’t.  Two signals in polarity that are also in phase will be arriving at the listener’s ear at the same time, although they come from two different sources.  What is this called?  Time alignment.

This concept effects everything we do as engineers and paying attention to it can add a whole new dimension to your mix. Scovi suggests there are three levels of coherence and success means experiencing the perfect storm of these:

1. Sound system. This one is largely scientific – minimal destructive interaction between PA boxes for any one listener, a high signal to noise ratio in the interaction of the designed array with the room, and high signal to noise ratio in the interaction of the PA and the stage. “All instruments are exiting the sound system at the same time.”

2. Performance. Scovi suggests this one is a combination of artistic discipline and scientific challenges/conclusions. This one is more band related – everyone playing in time, good inputs and execution.

3. Mix. Coherence in this area requires attention to detail – mic placement, inputs in polarity and phase with each other, and achieving the highest signal to noise ratio possible in the mix through successful use of gating, compression, and fader moves.

He gave an interesting example of the importance of phase and time alignment/interaction that I’ll never forget. He was mixing Tom Petty or Pink Floyd (I don’t remember which) in Europe as part of a large multi-day festival. The PA sounded awful throughout the whole event and he was dreading having to step up and deal with it in making his band the best they could be. The PA was configured with two rows, 6 or 8 speakers each stacked on top of each other per side, lined up side by side with no splay at all. Because of this, he made the assumption that the primary reason for sucky-ness was phase cancellation and comb filtering.

Just before the band hit the stage, he had the guitar techs go into secret ninja mode and unplug every other cabinet in the PA, alternating top to bottom as well, along with him bypassing the house EQs. The result was magnificent – easily the best mix of the festival. The PA crew was dumbfounded at the difference and in awe of Scovi’s skills when in reality the only thing he did different from all the other engineers was value the concept of coherence. (For the record, the techs plugged all of the PA cabinets back in when his set was done!)