Pensado’s Place

I mentioned this on Twitter a few weeks ago but figured it was worth a full blog post. A little while back I happened on a weekly video podcast led by Dave Pensado called Pensado’s Place that has quickly proven it should be required viewing for anyone serious about mixing. If you don’t recognize the name, I promise you that you know Dave’s work. Dave has mixed hits for bands like The Black Eyed Peas to Justin Timberlake, Elton John, Jamiroquai, and Christina Aguilera. In 2002, Dave received a Grammy for his work on the hit single “Lady Marmalade,” featuring Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mýa, and Pink. Do I have your attention yet?

Every week Dave and his manager Herb Trawick host a roughly 45 minute program that is full of techniques, q & a, and interviews with well known current mix engineers. The content is really well done and it’s really important to me that we support Dave in this since it is highly unusual to find someone as successful as Dave creating this kind of resource.

One of my favorite episodes was #4 when he interviewed Tony Maserati. I’m linking to it here to get you hooked and then go check out Dave’s site to catch up on the rest of the back episodes already in the can.

Mixing with In-Ears…my response

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably noticed quite a bit of chatter a few weeks ago regarding a post Mike Sessler wrote back around Christmas about mixing FOH with in-ears that has generated quite a bit of buzz.  It was recently republished on ProSoundWeb and in Live Sound magazine.  You can find the original post here, along with a later response here.  Dave Stagl wrote a great response to the topic here.  I took it pretty squarely on the chin by some people for challenging such a popular post so I thought it might be a good idea to try to more clearly outline the why behind my objection with more than 140 characters per post.  I’m going to try not to re-tread the things already written by others so make sure you catch up with the original posts if you haven’t already.  This actually piggybacks well on an overall topic that’s been on my heart for a long time but I’ve not had the specific inspiration to outline fully until now.

I agree completely with what others have said that the most important thing is that the people signing Mike’s checks are happy with the results he is getting from a challenging PA deployment and mix position.  I also fully understand that you need to do what you need to do when you’re mixing in a challenging room, and I’ve certainly had my fair share of those kinds of situations.  What actually set off the whole epic Twitter conversation was a tweet I saw posted to Mike that said this:

SOUND GUY #1: I was a doubter but I just mixed all practice with IEMs and it sounds really good! I just got a new method.

ME:  Boo!  I don’t get disconnecting from the live room.  It’s called live mixing for a reason! #justbecauseitsonablogdoesntmakeitgood

In the conversations that followed, here are a few examples of other responses I heard:

SOUND GUY #2: I could find the specific balance between instruments faster in my ears

ME: I would argue spend the energy learning to find that balance in the room rather than IEMs

SOUND GUY #2: Why? What is the argument for taking the harder path?  I’m not opposed to hard work if it has significant benefits

ME: Because your job is to mix for what the audience is hearing.  They aren’t listening to IEMs with ambience mics.

Another snipet went like this:

ME: How do you compensate for what’s happening in the room?  Great mixes, especially in worship, are emotional & responsive.

SOUND GUY #3: Same way a worship leader using ears does. Pay attention, watch and feel what’s going on around you. Respond to the moment.

SOUND GUY #4: Well hopefully the worship leader has audience in his ears and not solely depending on his eyes to gauge reaction

SOUND GUY #3: Which is the same reason we put the audience mics in our IEM reference mix.

I believe strongly that this conversation reflects a path some are heading down that is the antithesis of sound technique for mixing great music in churches.  I’m going to probably go a bit more spiritual here then I normally do on this site, but after mixing more than several thousand services professionally, I’m really passionate about this from first-hand experience.  Mixing worship is a beautiful dance that happens with every note between the musician on stage, the engineer creating the mix, the audience who is participating, and the Holy Spirit who is hopefully moving throughout the room.  A weakness or mis-step in any one of these areas will hinder the overall experience.  Try having an engaging worship experience without the Holy Spirit being present and tell me how that turns out.  Expect amazing worship with a disconnected audience and while the musicians may enjoy themselves, the overall room will suffer.  Really great music played by great musicians with a really responsive, great mix takes the experience for the audience to an entirely different level.  I believe all music and the emotions stirred within us as we engage come directly from God, so really this dance applies to any great music experience.  Stand in a stadium as U2 plays “Where The Streets Have No Name” and tell me that God isn’t behind the feelings you’re experiencing.  No Way!  Experience Fleetwood Mac playing “Don’t Stop Thinkin About Tomorrow” with the USC Marching Band and tell me that isn’t a spiritual experience.  No way!

When you put IEMs in your ears or headphones on your head while you mix, you are altering that balance between those four pillars in a fundamental way.  It is impossible for you to react to what is happening in the room the same when you are disconnected artificially from what’s happening in the space.  Yes you can put ambience mics into your reference mix and technically you are hearing the “audience” while you mix, but in no way is this the same thing.  You’re removing the intangible, inexplainable spirit from mixing and trying to replace it with a “technical” solution that while on paper is giving you the same technical experience, IT IS NOT THE SAME!  You might as well be outside of the room and mixing from a video monitor of the room.  There is no end to this slippery slope.

The only compromising solution I’ve ever experienced that will improve the mix location while still keeping you somewhat connected to the room is nearfield monitors at FOH, delayed back to the PA so they are time-aligned.  This is still a huge compromise because it is very different having speakers within several feet of your ears vs. the rest of the audience who is 30-100 feet away from drivers, but at least in this scenario you are still connected to what is actually happening in the room.  If something goes left while you’re mixing, the likelihood of you catching it is much higher.  Personally I love having monitors at FOH vs headphones.  I have mixed that way for three years and I could never go back.  I don’t even keep a set of headphones at FOH when I’m mixing – if I need to solo something up, it goes in the monitors so it places in front of the PA soundstage for me.

Are there some people using IEM’s on tour with good results?  Sure.  There are guys doing close under-micing of every cymbal in a drum kit too but that doesn’t mean that is the best approach to a natural and dynamic drum mix.  There are lots of things being done in live audio all over the world that someone has good luck with but doesn’t deserve to be replicated widely.  I promise you that you will not find one of the greats – Robert Scovill, Joe O’Herlihy, Dave Skaff, John Cooper, Dave Kob, and countless others – mixing for long stretches of time with something covering their ears.  Those are the guys that I aspire to mix like, and if you’re serious about this art, you should too.  Just like great stage artists of our time, these engineers’ work speaks for itself.

“The difference between greatness and mediocrity is not measured by the quality of the tools but by the quality of the approach.” – Robert Scovill, 2008 I believe @ Willow Creek Arts Conference

Here’s my point. It’s way too easy nowadays with all of the tools at our disposal to make mixing an intellectual, artificial, explainable task. We snapshot and program everything, we virtual soundcheck from a static performance for hours and hours, we use racks of plug-ins and outboard processing that would have never been available even 5 years ago, all in search of elusive greatness.  It’s human nature to take something that is unexplainable and try to make it explainable and repeatable.  I read many blog posts, magazine articles, and podcasts from experts with the best intentions every month, but the result way too often tries to make the inexplainable explainable.  Playing and mixing music is not an intellectual and repeatable task.  It’s mysterious…what works one day doesn’t necessarily the next.  The band doesn’t play the same every time.  The mix doesn’t develop the same every time from your snapshots.  Mixing is every bit a skill and an art that no matter how long you work to perfect, you cannot wrangle fully.  There’s always something new to learn, something new to adapt to. That’s what I love about what I do.

I challenge you with everything I have to embrace the tension of this beautiful dance.  It is not comfortable and it is not easy, but that’s part of the fun.  If your mix position is awful, I would argue there is NOTHING more important to address in your technical budget.  The reality is that people will tolerate poor lighting and poor video because neither are invasive to their person, but bad audio will keep a visitor from coming back to your church or a fan from buying another ticket to your show.  Can we fix every PA problem?  Certainly not – budgets often don’t allow it.  I mixed on an aged EAW KF650 rig for three years, 5 services a week, so I know well the frustration of knowing what the mix could be if it were only coming through a better transmission system.  If you have to come up with a creative solution to get you by until you can fix the real problem as Mike has done, by all means do whatever it takes to get the best audio you can get.

But I will disagree with you you every time if we’re considering mixing IEMs a superior technique outside of these compromised scenarios.  Master the art of mixing.  Only snapshot the bare minimum of what you can’t physically mix by hand.  If the band isn’t going to play it the same every time, why should you mix it the same each time through programming, plug-ins, and snapshots?  Plug-ins are an incredible tool, but run away from anything that takes you too far into the analytical brain and away from listening, mixing, and experiencing like a fan.

“Mix like a pro but listen like a fan. Always try to gain more of the listener’s perspective and turn off the analytical brain” – Scovill from the same conference.  This quote has always stuck with me.

Thank you for considering my perspectives and sticking with me through such a long post.  This actually sets up well the conversation we’re going to have next week at Gurus of Tech in Chicago on Mixing – It’s an Art, not a Plug-In.  I’d welcome dialog about this topic either here on the blog, via Twitter, or offline.

Nuts and bolts of PA tuning part 2

Yesterday we covered the thought process in tuning the main speakers in our PA.  Today we’re going to discuss delay fills.

After starting with the main speakers, I work outward from there until we get to the speakers in the back of the room.  Often the first step after mains is downfills.  I like to work my way out from the mains because as I add more speakers to what I’m listening to, they all start to work together and I have to follow that energy rather than fight it.  Every change you make to one set effects everything else so you have to think holistically and experiment.

The key to making fill speakers work is two things – delay time and EQ.  If the main speakers are our starting point and benchmark that everything else must align to, fill speakers such as downfill or delays will normally arrive at either slightly different or perhaps greatly different times to your ear depending on where you are standing in the room.  The trick is to use delay so that speakers that are separated by 5 feet or 75 feet sound like they are all arriving at your ear at the same time and thus working together.  I use my software program to help calculate the necessary delay times, often times with a bit of trial and error in real world to nudge things forward or backward just a bit so it feels right.

After the delay time is right, I like to first turn off the speaker I’m getting ready to work with and just measure how everything else we’ve already optimized sounds in the location of the fill speaker.  This tells us what is missing sonically in this location from what we’ve already done and that is what we will focus on with EQ’ing the fill speaker.  I will high-pass the speaker so the low frequencies that are already hitting the area from the main speakers are not competing with additional stuff trying to come from the fill.  Now balance the sonic EQ of the fill so the response curve sounds as close to standing in front of the main speaker as possible.  Continue this process with each set of fills and eventually all parts of the system are operating at the same time.

As I said, this is a very high level discussion because the reality is that the process of tuning a PA is as much art as it is science.  For me, depending on the complexity of the system and the acoustics of the room it is installed in, there can also be a fair amount of experimentation & trial/error.  One of our largest rooms at newlifechurch.tv has a distributed audio system design – 4 main arrays in the front of the room with downfills below them and then a ring of delay speakers 2/3′s of the way back.  It took me three attempts at tuning this room before I arrived at a product that I’m reasonably happy with as a long-term starting point.  Each time I did it, I learned more about how all of the speakers interacted with each other, the acoustics of the room, and the result was less and less needed EQ each time.

In my experience with trying to get a great board mix for broadcast from the same console mixing FOH, a well-tuned PA is absolutely required to have any chance of success.

Nuts and bolts of PA tuning

When I first visited newlifechurch.tv last winter, I knew immediately that one of my first tasks when we got here would be to start from scratch with PA tunings and system optimization across the board.  The tell-tale sign this would be necessary came from looking at channel EQ on the consoles.  Channel after channel showed LOTS of EQ and I heard complaints that the board mix that fed the internet campus never sounded as good as it did in the room.

I have a basic process that I follow when tuning a PA.  Everyone probably approaches something like this differently so your mileage may vary, but here’s a sampling of my thoughts.

First and foundational for me is to not take anything for granted pre-existing in the system from past engineers, the installation company, or “helpful” volunteers. Crossover points in bi or tri-amped speakers, the manufacturer recommended EQ points on a box, amplifier processing either bypassed or enabled, every speaker functioning, balanced levels between boxes, and on and on.  I like to begin by ensuring that every box is actually functioning, the array is balanced so that the level remains consistent as you walk the room, and that all DSP in the system is either flattened, bypassed, or disabled.

There is nothing worse then spending hours working on a set of speakers to then find that a circuit was engaged somewhere, thus coloring what you’re doing, and you didn’t know about it.  In one of the newlifechurch.tv rooms, just this step alone brought huge improvements to the system because I found that one of the three boxes in each of 4 arrays was operating at 50% of the volume of the other two boxes due to amplifier trim.  The result was unbalanced coverage front to back that had likely existed for a long long time.  Don’t take anything for granted!

Next, I’ll always begin a tuning process with the main speakers.  In some rigs, like one of our main rooms, this is all I need to deal with because there are no delays or fills to add into the mix.  The main speakers will always carry the biggest load of the work in a system and put the most energy into the room.  Because of this, I like to start here and then fit the other boxes around the mains.  I’ll talk about the software I use in another post.  For now we’re keeping it to a 10,000 ft level and just talking process.

The ear doesn’t hear things “flat”, especially as the volume level increases to concert levels.  As such, I’m not looking to create a flat PA.  Some guys named Fletcher & Munson did lots of research years ago on this hearing phenomenon, resulting in the Fletcher – Munson curves.  (Google it if this is completely new to you – fascinating stuff.)  In working with the main speakers, I’m looking to smooth them out sonically and ideally emulate a Fletcher-Munson curve (smooth cut in the PA that starts around 1k and has its deepest point at 4 or 5k before returning to normal by 10k).

I go back and forth between measuring a 2 second sine sweep in order to graph frequency response and listening to a playlist of room tuning songs from my iPod that I’ve been using for this purpose for years and KNOW how they should sound.  Often times you can over-tune a set of speakers by going crazy with every little dip and peak on a frequency response curve, but the real test is how it actually sounds with music.  The magic is in a healthy balance between the two – science and art.  In the end, the ears always win.

Tomorrow we’ll cover delay speakers…

Audio for Video revisited

I’ve written over a year ago about the audio for video processing chain I developed at Kensington with a Venue console but thought it might be useful to revisit the process in a new place with a new console (this time, Yamaha M7CL’s).  The cool thing is that I’m using the exact same techniques as last time and the results we’re getting are stunning.  If you haven’t adopted a process like this for your outside world feeds, why not?  Seriously.  Ok, here we go.

First, it is extremely important that you be able to monitor your mix through headphones on the console or record the L/R feed, play it back, and it sound good.  This is a biggie.  If you’re working with a big room (more than 750 seats for this example) and sonically the mix you’re listening to just ain’t happening, you most likely need to revisit how the PA is tuned, something in the speakers themselves, etc.  I have a series of posts coming in the next week or two about my philosophy when it comes to system equalization & PA/room tuning so we’ll dive into all of that later.  For now, I’m assuming the mix you’re hearing in headphones sounds good, but its just dead – sounds like it was recorded in a studio.

We’re going to add two pairs of mics to the room.  The first pair is a set of shotguns that will be placed somewhere along the front corners of the stage, out of the way, aimed out perpendicular to the front of the stage and in such a way they can throw out into the room without picking up too much of the first couple rows.  I have ours on tiny floor bases that make them just poke up over the front lip of our stage, pointed up at probably a 15 degree angle so they aim over the heads of those first couple rows.  These mics will be the primary pickup point for the audience themselves.  Pan them to 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock.  The exact make and model of these mics is not that important to me.  At Kensington and now at newlifechurch.tv I have used Audio Technica 8035B’s from Sweetwater, the least expensive name brand shotgun I can get.  I might feel different about the level of quality necessary if I ever tried better mics, but I’ve always had to do this project on a budget so bang for the buck rules here.  I’m most interested in the pickup pattern rather than necessarily the sonic character.

The second pair of mics needs to be condensers hanging about half way back in the room.  These can be high and also out of the way.  I have mine about a foot below the lighting grid so they are very high.  At Kensington I used some Audix small diaphragm units that were sitting on a shelf.  At newlifechurch.tv, I’m using some existing Shure MX choir microphones that were already in the air.  The purpose of these mics is to add space to the recording, so it will feel like its happening in a big room (which it is).  These get panned in the console to hard left and hard right.

Now in the console we do two things.  First, we split up all of our inputs to one of two main busses – left/right and mono.  You must have a console that has left/right/mono discrete busses for this to work.  M7CL’s do.  Everything music related (band, vocals, playback, effects) routes to the left/right and we call this one music.  Everything speech related (pastor mic, MC’s, and spare pastor mic) go to the mono and we call it speech.  Now we need a few matrixes – a pair for the PA and a pair for what I call WORLD.  In the PA matrix, route music and speech at the same level.  But to WORLD, add about 6-8 dB to the speech side.  This will effectively balance out the perceived difference between music and speech on a recording.

Step 2 in the console is really easy with an M7CL – add the two pairs of audience mics in to the WORLD matrix we just built.  The ratio between the shotguns and hanging mics I’ve found sounds best in our rooms is almost 2:1 shotgun to hanging.  The hanging mics will wash things out really quickly so the trick is to get just enough to add the depth and dimension without putting in so much that it totally collapses the mix.  EQ both pairs of mics by adding a high-pass centered at least at 250 hz, pull out some 400hz & 2k, and I like to add a bit of sizzle to the hanging mics.  The last thing to do is turn on the buss compressor over the WORLD matrix, 10:1, medium attack & release, and set the threshold so the band pulls 2-3 dB off the top of the mix when things hit hard.

The finished result sounds like this…

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

DISCLAIMER: This is the first audio sample I’ve posted from NLC. It’s getting there but still a long way to go! Figured I’d give you samples in process rather then just waiting until it is all perfect. Ok, resume…

On our M7CL’s, I’ve invoked user levels in order to lock out access to the room mic channels and the WORLD matrix so that everything happening behind the scenes to build this mix will be protected and can be relied upon.

I’d love to hear your modifications on this system and, if you try it, your experiences.

M7CL tricks part 2

Today’s trick for the M7CL is not quite as involved as last week’s, but I think it is very powerful for efficient workflow.

Everyone has their own ideas for how best to lay out the 12 user defined keys on the console.  Up until a few months ago, my norm was for keys 1-8 to be direct sends on faders buttons for mix busses 1-8, with keys 9-12 reserved for a couple mute groups, talkback, and a scene advance button.  However, I discovered an option for user keys that I used to utilize on the PM1D and never realized existed on the M7CL:  page bookmarks.

The touchscreen on the console is a blessing and a curse to me.  There are some parts of operating the software that lend themselves quite well to a touchscreen but sometimes I miss having more direct access buttons to things such as the EQ & dynamics sections, as well as FX processors that reside on the Rack page.  Assigning a user defined key as a page bookmark is REALLY handy because it allows me to bring back some of that fast access I want to menus or screens I’m getting to all the time so I can remove a touchscreen key press and instead get somewhere quicker with muscle memory and button feel.

I’ve started setting up my user defined keys so the first row of 4 are set up as page bookmarks that get me in 1 button press to the EQ detail, Dynamics detail, and my VOX Verb & VOX Delay.  It’s a simple thing but it feels like it speeds up my workflow around the desk because now I can select a channel, press my EQ shortcut button, and then start dialing away at that channel’s sound.  Same for dynamics.  I’m constantly going to my verbs to dial them in exactly how I want them to sound.  Without this shortcut, getting to that edit screen is at least a 2 step process and might be 3 depending on what screen I’m coming from.  Now 1 press of the shortcut brings it up and another brings me back where I was previously.

Check it out.  You might find page bookmark shortcuts does the same for your workflow.