Archive for April, 2009
Reviewing your mix
Now that I think we’re through the Easter wrap-up, it’s time to return to your regularly scheduled content!
A great way to grow as a mix engineer is to make the habit of recording your mixes for later evaluation. On the surface this can seem really painful because when you first start doing it, you’ll often not like what you hear. It is much easier to blame the recording by saying it doesn’t sound like it does in the room rather than accept the fact that what it being heard live is tainted by what you think. However, there’s lots to learn from hearing what actually left the console.
My board mixes at Kensington are recorded to video for every service we do, through a simple processing chain I’ve written about before. I also have a CD recorder and laptop set up so the same 2-mix going to video can be recorded for my personal review, portfolio, and growth. There’s so much insight I learn about myself and what I thought I was hearing when in the room. Can you expect to hear a commercial-release quality mix? Of course no way. But the basics should be there – good balance, a strong foundation, everything fitting into the correct relationships, etc. If you’re willing to get started with this, I have a couple of suggestions for you.
First, its really important that you listen to the disc without over-thinking everything. If you’re like me, its easy to focus in on any particular element and become distracted to the point that you miss the objective review element. Keep the big picture and try to listen with fresh ears for things that stick out, things that could be corrected, and things you didn’t hear in the room. Often times this is the first place I may find I was hitting a mic pre too hard and causing a bit of distortion, effects were too light or too heavy, or something wasn’t translating as I expected it should.
Secondly, it is an invaluable skill for a mix engineer to be able to evaluate a mix…especially one that isn’t quite working yet and figure out ways to pull things away that are stealing focus rather than boosting things that are missing.
I’m really proud of most of the board mixes I do nowadays, but it certainly wasn’t always that way. Objectively reviewing your mixes has been very helpful in my advancement as an engineer and I can’t recommend the discipline enough! If you’re interested in a few of my mixes, check out the media tab to the left. Everything you’ll find there are live FOH board mixes, run through a mild high-quality limiter and a few pairs of audience mics added in.
Guitar Mic
What is your favorite electric guitar mic for live use? Other than SM57 or MD421, I’m hoping to learn about some other great tools that might be lower on the radar. Let’s fill up the comments.
Thanks!
Photoblog: Good Friday 09
Wrapping up the Easter marathon coverage, here’s a photoblog of the awesome Good Friday service. This set was built in front of our mid-traveller, so the Easter set lived happily behind and the turn from GF to Easter wasn’t too bad on Friday night after the last service.
Thanks for following this year’s Easter journey!
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Easter 09: Behind the Scenes
Here’s a video I shot while we were in the middle of our run with a little backstage tour. (RSS readers, head to the site to see the video)
It seems the biggest question we’ve gotten is how we did the big screens that move. You see a little bit of them in the video above but I’m not one to focus too much on video! However, those screens were THE set element in the day, so there were a lot of resources dedicated to getting it right. Believe it or not, it’s actually really simple to implement.
First, the projector and screen are mounted to a “wagon” of sorts so they always move together and the alignment remains perfect. That wagon rides on two tracks that are drilled into the stage, one at the front under the screen and one at the back under the projector section. The tracks are just long enough to account for how close and far the screens need to be from each other, with just enough break in the center for the drums and keys decks to fit through, and just enough break on the offstage sides for the Megabeats percussion and Slam Grand piano to get on and off stage. We experimented with a few different castor types and means of moving the wagons to find the smoothest option.
Second, each screen/projector wagon is connected to a long bar that is painted black and runs along the floor to off stage. Each wagon has a stage hand dedicated to it, and they pull or push the bar, moving the screens in and out to spiked positions based on calls from the Stage Manager. Obviously it took some practice to get them to be comfortable moving at the same speed.
Third, the screens are 9ft x 12ft. They are each fed an output from the video switcher, allowing us to feed them video content from 2 discreet Doremi Labs Nugget players (one for each screen) or PVP/Powerpoint. All of the “blended” video content was created in Final Cut and then exported as two discreet video feeds that play in sync with each other through the Nugget.
I think that covers it. If there’s something else I missed, ask away!