An old friend

If you mix on Yamaha consoles, here is tip number I’ve lost count…Delay LCR.  It will be your friend.  I promise.

A few weeks ago I spent an evening mixing on a Meyer rig with a Yamaha PM5D at FOH.  After having spent 2 years on a PM1D at Kensington, it was like coming home to an old friend.  No plug-ins, parallel compression, or other tricks – just focusing on the fundamentals that make a mix great.  It’s a great reminder that the engineer and musicians are what make a mix.  The tools are only that – tools.

Values to achieve the NLC “Sound”

One of the most appealing parts of my transition to New Life Church last summer was inheriting a blank canvas of sorts when it comes to values and execution.  The talent here, both on and off the stage, is first class.  However, we’d never spent any time defining our “sound” and some strategies to be more consistent in arriving at it.  So a few months ago I committed these ideas to paper and we’ve been living inside of them ever since.  The inspiration for this discussion on the blog came from a common question I heard at Gurus a few weeks ago regarding getting a group of volunteer engineers to think alike and begin to move the same direction in crafting a mix.

Last time we discussed overall team mission and values.  I think this has to be defined first before going any further. Transitioning to more specific mix values, here’s what we’ve been living with…first some general concepts…

Accurate Tones:  We value getting it right on stage.  Great input makes great output, so it ALWAYS must start on stage.  This includes drum tuning, keys patch selection, mic placement on guitar amps, etc.

Classic:  There is a timeless quality to some records and overall music approaches that have stood the test of time.  Classic, good tones that don’t stray too far one direction or the other, trying to avoid super dated verbs/choruses/delays.  It is our goal to make timeless mixes that translate well both inside and outside our rooms.

Dynamic:  A worship set should be a journey.  Again, starting on stage and then translating through the engineer, it’s important that we take our audience on the most incredible journey.

Active:  Mixes should be active, always looking for the most interesting thing and highlighting it.  Many engineers have a tendency to be level managers and always mix a measure behind – one measure behind on pushing the solo, one measure behind on the transition, and on and on.

Now to specifics of our “sound”…

Drums/Bass and Vocals are both foundational.  Of course in worship music there is nothing more important than the lyric.  However, there’s a fine line we balance here between the vocal sitting just right in the mix or being too far out front (what I call a “churchy” mix).  Drum sounds that are dynamic, engaging, natural, and just sound great are the foundation the rest of the mix is built on.

Electric Driven.  The reality of the most common style of music we play is that it is electric guitar driven.  The hook of most songs is somehow connected to electrics, so it is important to mix like they are important to us.  This is one of those other ways to avoid a “churchy” mix…keep them out front.  As an extreme generalization, the only times the electric shouldn’t be driving the mix is when he’s not playing.  Ha!  Seriously, when the band drops out its important to find something else to fill the space such as acoustic or piano, but most of the stuff we do is driven by electric.

Keys and Acoustics provide texture and interest.  A mix that is 100% drums/bass/electric can certainly become boring, so keys and acoustics provide the flavor to add musical interest.  Mix them that way.  It is RARE that the acoustic should be further out front than the electric if both are playing.  Sometimes keys or acoustics share focus with electric, such as in the intro hook to “Greatness of our God”.

Lead Vocal relationship to BGV, Male to Female vocals.  We have a lot of people on stage on a given weekend.  A lot.  There is a coolness and hipness to this that just works at New Life Church.  I was really skeptical of it coming in but it’s really engaging in the room and works really well for us.  However, there are few songs we do that should be mixed as a huge group vocal.  There are several, but most have a clear lead vocal/BGV thing going on and its important to honor that in order to maintain relevance musically.  The same goes for the relationship of male to female singers.  More often not there are 2:1 more women on stage than men, but there’s no faster way to make a mix “churchy” than too much female vocal sitting on top of the whole thing.  We accomplish this a couple ways – first in the arrangement and making use of lower harmonies so the ladies will naturally sit in the middle of the mix rather than on top, second through actively managing the level relationship in the group and keeping lead vocal out front with the BGV group tucked nicely behind it.

I’d welcome discussion about this topic either here in the comments or via Twitter.

Audio Team Values

One of the most surprising revelations I received during Gurus from so many people I talked to was how few teams have clearly defined mission and values, as well as value statements to define the target for mixing success.  I thought it might be cool to outline our team’s mission and values with some thoughts…

The mission of our audio team is to create moments for people to engage with God.  We try to do this with excellence since I believe that excellence honors God and reflects His perfect character, and through Christ-driven ideals.  Our serving should come out of the overflow of our personal relationship with Jesus.  Our team values include many areas I’ve written about over the years…

• The Table is Set:  it is extremely important for us to be prepared for the artists’ arrival with everything tested and ready to go so the people on stage can focus on creating music and moments with as little distraction from us as possible.
• Accountable:  doing what we say we will do, not making problems mysterious, taking accountability when we make a mistake and learning from it so it doesn’t happen again
• It’s All in the Details:  audio is a game of a million itty bitty steps.  There is no single smoking gun that will equal a great mix.  It’s all in the incremental tiny moves that equal audio amazingness.
• Change Happens:  it is so important to stay flexible and prepared to adjust to requested changes.  Most times strong preparation makes it possible to adjust to change more easily.
• Are You Being Served? It is our privilege to serve the musicians, vocalists, pastors, and ultimately our church in engaging with God.  Everything we say and do should come from the perspective of doing whatever possible to facilitate an unforgettable experience for the people on stage.  The result will most often translate directly to the people in the seats.
• Push the Envelope:  It is important to keep looking for ways to improve what we do and never become satisfied with the status quo.  There is always a way to be better in our craft.  Mixing is a skill and requires constant refinement.
• Rest in the Call:  it is the call of God on our lives that allows us to be successful mixing audio.  Mixing can be especially stressful and a high pressure position.  It’s important to keep perspective regardless of how good or bad things go that we are honoring God by serving Him with our talents and resting in that call.

I started out putting this whole thing in one post but it’s too much, so I’m splitting into two.  Next time we’ll dive into specific mix values.  If you haven’t defined your mission or values – both in general or directly related to the mix – I challenge you to do so.  I think you will find the exercise beneficial for your team.  Only time will tell how impactful these thoughts really become to our team.  But ever since committing to them, I make it a practice to use them in conversation or in coaching, all the while looking to make them part of who we are.

Until next time…

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…

System Tuning 101

One of the first tasks that I’ve undertaken as I dive headfirst into audio at New Life Church is the tuning of our PA systems in our main rooms.  However, before addressing the journey of each room from where it began to where it has ended up, I thought it would be good to outline as concisely as I can a philosophy for how I think a PA should be configured and what equalizers in the chain should be used for what purpose.  Eventually, over the course of multiple posts, I hope to come around full circle to not only show what I’m trying to accomplish in the room, but how that translates to an audio for video capture process as well.

In my mind there are three places in a system where equalizers normally reside.  CHANNEL EQ –> SYSTEM EQ –> SYSTEM PROCESSOR. We’re going to talk about them out of this order in order to get my point across so here we go…

First is the channel EQ that exists on the mixing console.  I view the responsibility of this part of the chain to provide correction or artistic shaping of the interaction between a microphone and an instrument or vocal.  If a mic is too woofy on a vocal or a guitar amp is too harsh (and you’ve already tried to improve the situation at the source by working with the artist), the channel EQ is the place to make the necessary adjustments.  Carrying this out, once you’ve made all of the corrections to the various inputs, you should then be able to listen to the results of this mix through headphones or record the left/right mix and play it back on another speaker system and have a good representation of what you intended the mix to sound like.  It shouldn’t be too bright or too dull because you’ve fixed all of those individual combinations on the channel strips.

The second equalizer/processing location in a large sound system is the system processor which addresses the PA speakers themselves – the crossover points of a bi or tri-amped system, signal delay necessary to get all of the speakers arriving in a common time domain, and equalization that addresses the natural interactions between all of the speakers in an overall system.  Normally this degree of processing occurs inside a system processor – a Dolby Lake, BSS London, proprietary amplifier, or in my case, Shure P4800′s.  It is located in the chain directly before the signal coming from the sound mixer hits the amplifiers that drive the various speakers.

The final equalizer/processing location is the overall system equalizer.  This point in the chain falls between the output of the mixer and the input to the system processor/amplifier/speakers.  Sometimes this processing point might be combined into the system processor, in the old days it used to be simply a trusty 31 band stereo graphic equalizer.  The purpose of this equalization step is to optimize and correct the speaker system as a whole to the acoustics of the room where it is located.  If the room is boomy or harsh, live or dead, etc. the system EQ allows the engineer to craft the overall sound of the speakers so that what comes out of the mixer sounds transparent (meaning what came out of the mixer is what comes out of the speakers) in the room.

I outlined the three parts in the order I did because I kind of look at them in that order of mental processing as well.  The channel EQ corrects for individual inputs and builds the mix itself, the system processor corrects for all of the individual speakers and amplifiers and builds them into a cohesive system, and then the system EQ is the glue that brings those first two pieces together into what is heard in the room.  If any of those three places in the chain is not properly optimized, the overall product will suffer.

The primary goal I’m trying to achieve as I think about these three parts of the sound system is transparency.  I want what sound came out of the console to come out of the speakers with the same sonic characteristics (transparency).  The simplest way to test this is to play a known recorded track (I have a playlist of songs that I use to test how a PA sounds) through the speakers and see if what comes out sounds like how I know that track should sound because I’ve listened to it thousands of times through hundreds of different PA’s – the balance of low end to top end, the harshness or lack thereoff, the warmth of the system, etc.  Why does this matter?  Because if the PA is not transparent, if what comes in is NOT what goes out on the other end, I’m going to have to make corrections somewhere else in the chain (normally at the same places on every channel’s EQ) to make the mix work and this will likely compromise that board mix.  It also makes it far more difficult for a more novice engineer to achieve a great mix unless they are more comfortable with channel EQs or for me to get something great happening quickly because I’m going to have to apply more corrective EQ which will take more time to dial in.

In my experience, the biggest weakness I find in installed PA systems is in the optimization of the system EQ.  More often than not (and exactly what I’ve dealt with at NLC.tv), the system EQ does not make the PA system transparent.  Playing an iPod track through the console without any channel EQ will sound far different coming out of the speakers than it would listening through good headphones on the console or a different speaker system.  The core sonic characteristics of the song do not translate through the room.  As a result, the engineer needs to apply channel EQ to correct for these room problems in order to start mixing with a blank canvas.  In our iPod example this can be easily done because we’re only talking about a single stereo input.  However, explode this out to a 6 or 7 piece band, 5-8 vocals, and 30 or more channels and the task can be far more daunting.  The byproduct is that the L/R board mix, which often feeds video recording or internet feeds, suffers greatly.  All of the board mix changes that are made to make inputs work in the poorly tuned room are more drastic than what was really needed so the L/R mix isolated by itself is nothing to be excited about.

Next time we’ll start getting specific about a tuning philosophy to correct these problems.