Archive for Mixing
Mixing Techniques for John Mayer
Continuing the video blog Mondays format of the past few weeks, here’s another cool gem of Manny Marroquin outlining mix thoughts from John Mayer’s tune “I Don’t Trust Myself”. There’s good insight here.
Books Update
I’ve recently been through two music history-type books that are worth the read. There is so much to learn studying the work of engineers who have achieved greatness in our industry.
IN THE STUDIO WITH MICHAEL JACKSON by Bruce Swedien
No one was closer to Michael Jackson at the height of his creative powers than Bruce Swedien, the five-time Grammy winner who, with Jackson and producer Quincy Jones, formed the trio responsible for the sound of Jackson’s records – records that topped the charts and shook the world. Friend, co-creator, and colleague, Bruce Swedien was a seasoned recording engineer-plucked from a job at legendary Universal Audio in Chicago – when he began working with Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones on the soundtrack to The Wiz, and he was the master technician who gave the records their sound as the trio progressed to Jackson’s greatest triumphs, Off the Wall and the iconic, history-making Thriller, which revolutionized music and video and fixed Jackson in culture as the King of Pop. In the Studio with Michael Jackson is the chronicle of those times, when everything was about the music, the magic, and the amazing talent of a man who changed the face of pop music – and culture – forever. In his laid-back style, Bruce Swedien offers anecdotes about being part of Quincy Jones’ extended “family” and reveals the technical details of creating Michael Jackson’s biggest-selling albums, as well as Bad, Dangerous, and HIStory. Including over 100 photos, In the Studio with Michael Jackson provides an insider’s look that will thrill anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of hit making and the history of some of America’s most influential music.
HOW DOES IT SOUND NOW? LEGENDARY ENGINEERS & VINTAGE GEAR by Gary Gottlieb
Chet Atkins was playing his guitar when a woman approached him. She said, “That guitar sounds beautiful.” Chet immediately quit playing. Staring her in the eyes, he asked, “How does it sound now?” The quality of the sound in Chet’s case clearly rested with the player, not the instrument, and the quality of our product ultimately lies with us as engineers and producers, not with the gear we use. How Does It Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear contains insightful interviews with 31 of the most famous audio engineers of all time on how they utilized (and in some cases invented) classic analog recording hardware to make some of the highest quality recordings of all time. Each interview provides a walkthrough of audio and music history as you learn how some of your favorite recordings came to be made. But the interviews don’t only reveal what gear was used and why. Throughout the discussions, each interviewee brings up how creating quality recordings was and always will be the ultimate goal of the engineer. And of course, a big reason why each of these legendary engineers was so successful was that their standards for quality were so high. The interviews are loaded with advice and insight on how recording is an art form and how one might go about becoming a master.
We Believe
If you follow my Twitter or Facebook accounts, you’ll remember lots of posts this past summer & fall about studio time. After a year or so away from the studio, I took a project this past summer to engineer & mix a worship project for the church I was last involved with before going to Kensington. I’ve been good friends with Chris Lindsey, who produced the project & sang lead vocals, for almost 10 years now but we’d never done something like this together. It was a lot of fun.
Because of my heritage in the Church of Christ, I have lots of experience with acappella vocals. I’ve always found this background served me well as an engineer. If you can mix/blend 4 or 5 part contemporary vocal stuff, it seems like mixing a band is often times MUCH simpler. My background made a big difference in mixing bands with money vocals like Avalon or Huey Lewis.
Below are some samples of what we did. Everything you’ll hear, including the percussion, is all vocal. Each song is comprised of 6-10 bed vocals – all doubled. Add lead vocal, bass, and percussion and all told, most tunes come in with anywhere from 24-40 tracks. I work exclusively in ProTools and this was my first project to do completely in new Version 8. I have about 90 hours in the project – 35 tracking and 55 editing, tuning, & mixing. My friend Michael Forehand, a great engineer himself, mastered everything for me and I’m very pleased with the finished result. Check it out and if you’re interested in more about Chris or picking this up for yourself, head over to his website at chrislindseymusic.com
Let God Arise
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Oh The Deep Deep Love
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Mighty To Save
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Ambience Mic Thoughts
I’ve had quite a few questions regarding ambience mic technique, what to use, etc. We now use three sets of ambience/audience mics, each with a different purpose for capturing the room. Inspired by some great discussion on the Digidesign User Forum, my implementation is…
Mics #1 are a set of Audio Technica 835 shotgun mics (purchased for this project) on the outside corners of our stage, mounted just under our side screens, pointed out into the room. These are the primary audience pickup source because so much of the audience’s energy is directed towards the stage that these do a great job of capturing without adding too much PA to the mix. They’re inexpensive and sound good for what I’m using them for. You could certainly upgrade the make/model here to something more boutique but this serves our purposes well.
Mics #2 are a set of Crown PCCs placed on the lip of the stage at the 1/3 and 2/3 lines from left to right. These combine with the shotguns to provide some presence and immediacy to the signal since another set of shotguns wouldn’t be acceptable aesthetically in these positions.
Mics #3 are a pair of Shure SM81s hung from the first catwalk, almost at the half way point of the room, also on the 1/3 and 2/3 lines to the stage. These mics serve almost entirely the purpose of room ambience – making the mix sound like it is happening in the auditorium rather than happening in a dead studio.
The three sets of ambience mics serve dual purpose for us – ambience for IEM and ambience for the broadcast/record feed. In the IEM world, we lean most heavily on the shotguns at the front of the room at the corners of the stage and supplement that with the PCCs on the front of the stage towards the center. These mics are used mainly because they provide localization of what the artist is hearing in their ears. For example, when someone to the artist’s right calls to the stage, we want everyone on stage to turn their head in that direction. Likewise, if someone on the front row is singing their heart out, it’s cool for the artists to be able to sense that from those PCCs on the front of the stage. That localization goes leaps and bounds towards breaking down the isolation. Every artist is different with how much ambience is just right.
We may still look to add an additional set or two but I’m stuck because adding them will mean needing to deal with delay times between those mics and the rest currently in place. Two of my current three sets are directly in line with the PA so there’s little issue there. The delay induced by the third set certainly does some phase stuff to the mix but the added space it puts in the mix when the speaker is up is worth the compromise to me. So we’ve dodged the bullet to this point and I’d like to avoid having to go there with more mics. This is one of the only limitations of creating the broadcast mix inside the Venue rather than in an outboard mixer/processor. There is no way to have the degree of time alignment control that would be needed in the broadcast feed without making other more significant sacrifices.
The shotguns are the most important piece of the puzzle for me because their pickup pattern is most effective at picking up the audience and rejecting PA and stage bleed. The PCCs are next important to fill in the center stage imaging – think of the shotguns panned hard left and right and the PCCs panned at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock or 10 and 2. The hanging mics are almost halfway back in the room and that time delay adds depth to the ambience space. For IEMs, it can be distracting. But for broadcast, it enhances the size of the room and makes it feel more real when you’re listening back.
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?
