Archive for September, 2009
VIDEOBLOG: Kensington Production
In a break from some of the serious content of the past few weeks, I want to share a couple of what I think are really cool videos about the production team and music team at Kensington. These were prepared as part of a Fall push for more volunteers on our teams. Kensington can sometimes be criticized by outsiders for unorthodox methodology in reaching the community for Christ, but I think these videos really capture the heart and mission of why we do what we do. I’m very proud to serve on this team.
Watch the music one first for more on our mission and some stories about our incredible artist team, then check out my team’s profile.
Unity Mixing Followup
I ran across some cool conversations happening on the Sound on Sound forum a few weeks ago in reference to unity mixing. If you’ve missed the various things I’ve written about the topic, there are links on the homepage of this blog to the articles.
I’ve also seen another forum where one poster blasted me and called me a moron for approaching this topic. It has been fun to see how literally some people take this whole thing and think I’m somehow saying you should literally mix your show from the gain knobs or advocate poor gain structure in your console or the rest of the system. QUITE the opposite. I run my console really hot because we all think the Digidesign mic pre sounds better when its hit pretty hard and the desk as a whole sounds great when you get up and go with it. I think some are missing the point of my suggested unity mixing completely, so let’s dive into this just a bit to hopefully clear it up.
The whole point of this discussion is to make the inputs well mixed while setting gain, rather than just blindly going channel by channel and setting each to maximum individual gain. It doesn’t have to be perfect but just get things in the neighborhood so you don’t have to run some faders -30 or -40 dB below others. This makes mixing monitors from the same desk (which we do at every Kensington campus) MUCH easier. In this configuration, the inputs are well mixed, so that the sends to the monitor mixes and FOH faders are (more or less) at the same place across the board, making adjustments for the band a lot easier. If I know the band well, I can often dial in their monitor mixes from the FOH board ahead of soundcheck and nail it with few, if any, changes needed. We’re still running the inputs as a whole as hot as they should be through the desk so let’s not get into the whole topic of maximizing digital bits in the desk and the like.
Another example… imagine trying to adjust a monitor send, pre-fader of course:
A) with a very hot input, therefore with the FOH fader pulled down a lot, and
B) with a low input setting, with the fader pushed nearly all the way up . . .
‘A’ will be very sensitive to tiny adjustments at 9 o’clock and
‘B’ will need large movements at 4 o’clock.
With a mess like this all over a big mix, the experience is not nice trying to keep the band happy with their wedges and that is what gets so many of our engineers in trouble!
Second, if you end up with a difference, for whatever reason, where one fader is sitting at -30 or -40 dB most of the time, you have a MUCH harder time mixing due to the same amount of travel for a 3dB difference at or near unity, now gives you a 10-20 db difference with every move (Or whatever it works out to on the board, but a LARGE difference). This makes fine tuning a mix really difficult.
That’s it. Does this help make the concept clearer at all?
Wrapping up IEM discussion
It’s been fun going through this IEM journey the past 2 weeks. To wrap up the series, I thought I would post the full songs that all of the mixes were taken from you so can see the context of the performances.
These two tunes are from an all-worship series we did in late August/early September. First, “My Savior, My God”…
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Next, a Danny Cox original I’ve posted before but with a fresh mix of the track…
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Thanks everybody. Back to regularly scheduled programming next time around.
Inside IEM Mixes: Lead Vocal
We finally made it to the last and likely most important mix in the IEM series…lead vocal/worship leader. In this particular example our lead vocal is also playing acoustic, so not surprisingly you’ll hear those two inputs most focused in the mix.
As with some of the other mixes we’ve discussed, our vocalists seem to largely prefer their voices dry…if they want to wetten things up, adding more of the extras channel does the trick. This works well in our particular setup since the vocals are fed to the IEM system direct off of board channels – adding verb would increase the complexity of routing.
I strongly encourage everyone who wears ears to keep both sides in all the time. My primary reasoning is that your brain does a cool thing when it receives similar input from both ears in summing that source 6 dB internally. So, if you only wear one ear, you’re going to have to turn up your IEM mix approximately 6 dB in order for it to feel as loud as both ears in. Obviously you have to be really careful with this because an untrained artist could easily cause themselves hearing damage night after night of crazy levels in their IEM.
I say all that to say, the mix an artist wants changes pretty dramatically depending on whether they are wearing one or two ears. These mixes you’re going to listen to today are one ear in mixes, so you’ll find that the acoustic, vocal, and click are WAY more out front then in the other mixes we’ve analyzed since the artist is getting a lot of their sound ambiently through their other ear not wearing the IEM.
Our philosophy at Kensington regarding ears has been to do everything possible to gain band acceptance. By doing that, the stage volume lowers significantly and vocals have a much easier time just hearing themselves through a wedge. I’ve mentioned that we have 6 channels of wired ears and 1 wireless transmitter/receiver system. Because of this wireless limitation, we haven’t pushed very many vocalists to jump to ears. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since vocalists often have a much harder time adjusting to performing through IEM systems then instrumentalists because it can effect their pitch center, how loudly they perceive their head voice, etc. So we’ve had good success getting musicians on ears and, by doing that, getting enough sonic space on stage for the vocalists to be able to hear themselves comfortably through wedges and not have to deal with their transition yet.
I’ve heard from another large church that they have the policy that a new vocalist must sing BGV on ears for at least 6 months in order to get used to them before they would ever ask them to sing lead VOX. I can certainly see the wisdom in that approach.
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We’ll wrap this whole thing up next time with the live mixes of the 2 songs we’ve been using for test material so you can hear overall context. See you then!
Inside IEM Mixes: Keys
Continuing the IEM series, today we’re talking about the keys mix. We’re departing from the two tunes we’ve used for the rest of this series since there weren’t any keys in that band.
On a given week, we submix as many as three keys sources in mono to send to the IEMs. The first source is Ivory from our Slam Grand. If the piano shell is not in the set, often times I will still run MIDI out of the primary keyboard into the Ivory system so that tone is available if we want a grand piano patch in the day. The other two inputs are our house keys – a Yamaha Motif8 and a Korg Triton. Every once in a while one of our artists might bring in their own boards but it doesn’t happen very often in a month.
I was concerned when we first installed our IEM system that the keys would need to be in stereo just like the drum kit in the ears mixes and that would present channel count issues with our desired allocation. Thankfully, I don’t think anyone has ever commented on the keys being submixed to mono rather than stereo. As a result, the only truly stereo submixes in the ears are the drum mix and the extras channels. Everything else goes to the IEMs in mono and can be panned around in each individual mix as desired.
I’ve received a few questions via email for more information about the ambience mics specifically so I am preparing more info about that to tag onto the end of this series.
With that said, check this out…
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Next time we’ll listen to the final IEM mix – lead vocal/worship leader. Thanks for reading!
