Archive for Theory
Youtube: Audio Myths Workshop
This is a video version of a workshop from the October 2009 AES show in New York City called Audio Myths workshop by Ethan Winer. In this video you will hear what phase shift sounds like, compare high- and low-end converters, learn about proper test methods, understand why hearing is not as reliable as test gear, and much more. So set aside an hour when you won’t be disturbed, and enjoy.
The original high quality example Wave files mentioned can be downloaded from Ethan’s web site: http://www.ethanwiner.com/aes
Bruce Swedien
I recently ran across the work of another audio engineering legend that is worth checking out. The names of the people he has worked with are too many to list, but when one mentions musicians like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan, Eddie Harris, Quincy Jones, Jennifer Lopez, and even Michael Jackson, a great deal is immediately understood.
Mr Swedien wrote a book in 2004 called Make Mine Music that gives away detailed information from his lifetime in the studio-from a musical, technical, and very personal perspective. This book has something for everyone who is interested in music, especially those curious about the stories behind the scenes of some of the best music to ever come out of the recording studio. I came across the book in 2005 but had forgotten I even owned it. Upon rediscovery, there are too many pearls of audio wisdom in this book to list.
Being such a fan of Bruce, it was with great interest that I found this snippet a few weeks ago on ProSoundWeb from the book that is solid content for anyone who practices this artform of mixing modern music. Here Bruce writes about developing your own “audio personality” for how you evaluate what you hear and translate it into an actual mix “product”.
Do yourself a favor and check this out. If you’re like me and the article resounds with you, pick up the book. I think you’ll be glad you did!
Own The Mix.com
In the past few days I’ve come across a resource for church audio that I think everyone associated with house of worship markets should know about called OwnTheMix.com. I’ve never seen anything like this so please consider this a must investigate for your team!
From their website…OwnTheMix.com is a comprehensive audio training solution for the modern church. Created by Buckhead Church’s Audio Director, Dustin Whitt, and Music Director, Chris Green, you will learn secrets to creating irresistible worship environments. Whether novice or professional, there is plenty for everyone inside. Subscribers have an all-access pass to every video, and are connected to all of OwnTheMix.com’s users through a state-of-the-art social network that includes forums, blogs, and groups based on like interests or topics. What makes this content unique is that there is an important balance between tech & music – they get the necessity of this unique partnership that is so critical to audio success in churches.
Training topics include basic EQ, compression, and gating for bass, electrics, keys, drums, & vocals, miking instruments, combat mixing, console gain structure, basic drum tuning for engineers, mixing musically, EQ and mic placement for speech, transitions, working with musicians, working with drummers, and much more. There’s also training content that currently focuses on the Digidesign Venue platform, although videos are coming soon that will also train on Aviom & the Yamaha M7CL. Finally there are several multi-part interviews with other members of the Northpoint audio team such as Dave Stagl and Chris Briley, and notable FOH engineers such as Jeff Sandstrom (Chris Tomlin).
A 1-year subscription starts at $200 for a single seat and the price per seat goes down as you add more users from your organization to the site. The really cool thing is that if they were to put an accurate price tag on what is taught in this site, it wouldn’t be affordable for many churches. The value is extremely high! If you paid a contract soundguy $50 an hour to run your Sunday services just for one morning, you’ve paid for an entire year of training for a committed volunteer. The site really is one-of-a-kind and content is still being added weekly.
I’m proud to say Kensington Church has secured a license for our entire audio team and I will be leading our team through this content over the coming year. It has been on my heart for months to find a way to focus on basic audio concepts and develop more of a culture of organized continuing education for the team but had yet to find a means that would be the right fit.
I showcased a new book I picked up this past winter called “Mixing Audio” on this blog that is the best resource I’ve ever read for the art of mixing music. The problem is that a large percentage of our audio team are also campus tech directors or work full time jobs in other industries entirely, so I expected a tough sell to get everyone to read such a large, focused book and get together for discussions.
OwnTheMix is perfect for us because we can “assign” a handful of videos for guys to watch on their own time that are reasonably short for those with ADD attention spans (it seems most average 3-6 minutes) and pack lots of solid concepts in each one. Then we’ll meet together every other week for an hour to unpack what we’re learning and discuss questions or applications. I’m excited to see what God will do in our team over the coming months!
I can’t recommend this resource enough. If you are involved in church audio in any way, RUN to this site and sign up for you and your team. I’m certain you won’t be disappointed!
Time Alignment Samples
Ok here we go…
The first sample is the snare and overheads. I’m flipping the delay in and out on the snare channel every 4 beats. The biggest place you’ll hear the difference is in the body of the drum. The non aligned signal sounds really thin compared to the time aligned one.
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The second sample is the entire kit with delay and without delay. In order to make it easier to compare as you’d like, I included these as separate files. First, the delayed and time aligned kit.
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Second, the non aligned kit.
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As you can see, maybe its subtle – I’m not sure how its translating across the web, MP3 compression, etc. In my room, the difference is pretty huge when you’re trying to get great individual tones and make everything play nice together.
Time Alignment & the Drum Kit
If you mix on a digital console, this post is REALLY important. Unless you’ve been mixing under a rock, I’m sure you’ve heard about time aligning your drum mics. I’ve been reading about others’ results with this for a long time but have never been faithful to time align every time I mix because most of the samples I’ve heard of before and after have been less than convincing. My prejudice, and maybe yours as well if you’ve heard similar samples, is that time alignment on the console using channel delays is a 2% mix improvement step, not a 15% or larger mix thing. Because of our intense pace at Kensington, it has been hard to have the discipline to time align every time.
When I was mixing on a PM1D every week, I made an effort each time to time align by ear and just slide back the snare, hat, and tom mics back to the overheads by anywhere from 2-6 milliseconds. The difference was noticeable but still what I would consider a minor “glue” thing – certainly not earth-shattering. When I moved to the Venue, I kind of set the time alignment stuff aside for a few months in order to focus on more core tasks and efficiencies. A few months ago, I began to revisit time alignment and this time, for some reason, the results really were a game changer. I’m not sure exactly what to attribute that to, but I can share some tips on the overall approach I’ve settled on that seems to give the best results. If you haven’t tried this, I would suggest you should and see if it makes as big a difference for you as it did for me.
My goal in time aligning is so that the tone of a drum (let’s use the snare as an example) will sound nearly the same when listening to the close mic as when the overheads are added in. What I found a few months ago in the run up to Easter was that it was bothering me to get a snare sound I liked with the close mic and by the time the overheads were where I wanted them that tone was destroyed. Pull the overheads out and the snare tone would go back to where I wanted it. What I found was that I was hearing a combination of overheads with too low of a high-pass filter setting and comb filtering between the close mic and overheads.
I should preface that there are two different philosophies for overheads on a drum kit. The first is to place them strictly as cymbal mics. For some music styles or drummers, this is necessary in order to get the expected mix results. The other option is to use them as an overall kit mic that just so happens to have cymbals as a focus point. In this scenario, the high-pass filter will likely be set lower than it would for cymbal micing applications – probably 100-200 hz instead of 500 hz plus for cymbals. Another important part of the kit mic approach is using mics in a X-Y pattern over the kit. I go back and forth between a Rode NT4 and Shure KSM141s on the Shure stereo adaptor bar.
The first step to the results I want is to use the overheads as kit mics and still set the high-pass around 250 hz. This allows the overheads to still be the glue for the kit but the close mics to provide the “in your face” body of the sound.
Next, each mic is delayed back to the overheads. I’ve found the easiest way for me to do this is to have the drummer give me a quarter notes on each drum and record that into PT. (If you don’t have PT, instead of this technique, just go drum by drum and have the player give quarter notes while you dial each mic in) Once in PT, I zoom in closely on those hits and measure the difference in time between each of the close mics and the overhead. The results are usually somewhere between 40-160 samples. (You could also do this with milliseconds but because PT & Venue can go to samples resolution, that’s what I use) When you have it right, its the first time in my life that there is a negligible difference between the tone of the close mic and once you put the overheads in.
Next time I’ll post some samples that will hopefully convince you. This topic has been written about all over the web so if I’ve piqued your interest, start digging into it and feel free to ask questions here.
