Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio (Sound On Sound Presents...)

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Part 3 Balance processing strategies in each instance. Lead vocals, acoustic guitars, and pianos, for example, are often of much more sonic importance during sparser verses than during more densely populated choruses. A Jury of Your Peers Nervous about playing your mixes to other people? Well, grow up and get over it! I’m not trying to be macho for the sake of it here, it’s just that mixing on a professional level is about taking responsibility for your output, and that means playing it unflinchingly for all and sundry. By the time you’ve worked your way through the mixing process, your own ears will probably be the least Los Senderos Studio’s Recording Glossary: A large and clearly written glossary, which is also nicely interlinked and illustrated. Try this in the first instance.

Whatever you actually sit the speakers on, their exact positioning is also critical to getting good audio reproduction. You should try wherever possible to aim the speakers directly at the listening position. A speaker’s frequency response is measured on axis (i.e., from directly in front of it), so if you listen off axis, you won’t be hearing what the designer intended you to—high frequencies are more directional than low frequencies, so high-end details in particular tend to suffer. Moving around your listening room should amply demonstrate these effects with any full-bandwidth music mix, but if you want to hear the phenomenon at its starkest, then try listening to a constant full-range test signal such as my PinkNoise file through just one of your speakers. These aren’t just miniscule sonic niceties we’re talking about. High frequencies are also easily shadowed by physical objects, so make sure you can actually see the drivers you’re listening to. Aiming the speakers isn’t just about the horizontal plane either, because vertical alignment is usually even more important, for a couple of reasons. The first is that on most nearfield monitors, the cabinet is profiled around the tweeter to create what’s called a waveguide, which is designed to horizontally disperse the jet of high frequencies more widely and thereby increase the size of the optimum listening area (or “sweet spot”). Although waveguides can be quite effective at this, they don’t usually do the same job for the vertical high-frequency dispersion and can even make it narrower. But the second reason is that most nearfield monitors have more than one driver in them, with each driver in a different vertical position. A dedicated bit of circuitry or DSP (called a crossover) within the speaker splits the incoming signal’s frequency range between the different drivers at factory-specified boundaries (called crossover frequencies). Although ideally the crossover should therefore prevent any overlap between the frequency output of the different drivers, the truth is that there is inevitably a small spectral region around each crossover frequency where two drivers are both contributing significant levels at the same time. If the distance from each driver to the listening position isn’t the same, then the signals Flutter Echo Although the main resonance problems in studio rooms are at low frequencies, you can also get higher-frequency resonances too, often referred to as flutter echoes. The simplest test for these is clapping your hands in the sweet spot and listening for any hint of unnatural metallic-sounding buzz as the sound dies away in the room. If you’re suspicious, then another patch of acoustic foam on one or both of the offending parallel surfaces should put an end to it with minimal fuss because high frequencies are so easily absorbed.

Vocal Multing Examples: For the majority of the mixes I do, I end up multing the lead vocal part so that I can alter its processing to match changes in the song’s arrangement, and there’s a good example in Mix Rescue February 2009. First compare the two vocal sounds: verse Ex05.01: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow and chorus Ex05.02: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow. Then listen to how their processing and effects differences make sense within the context of the remix Ex05.03: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow. Another example can be heard in Mix Rescue March 2010. Again, here are the verse Ex05.04: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow and chorus Ex05.05: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow vocal sounds, as well as a section of the remix Ex05.06: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow to show how they contribute to the production as a whole. And a final example comes from Mix Rescue November 2008, where the verse vocal Ex05.07: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow and chorus vocal Ex05.08: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow are deliberately contrasted for more artistic effect, as you can hear within the context of the full remix Ex05.09: WAV/ MP3 play_arrow. Figure 8.9 The polarity button. It may not be much to look at, but it’s absolutely essential at mixdown, for both technical and creative reasons. By strategic, I mean that the author has a vision to which all the advice of the book is oriented: producing commercial grade audio mixes. Yes, there are lots of tactical tips sprinkled throughout the text, and they're quite helpful, but these are always in service to the greater goal. This is not a 'mixing tips' book, per se - it's something much better than that, a mixing strategy book.

For a number of other monitoring requirements, however, there are more modest systems that can actually outperform even a decent small-studio nearfield rig, simply by virtue of being better adapted to specific duties. This chapter introduces some of these additional systems, specifically the ones you can’t afford to do without if you’re seriously planning on competing with the big guns. Let’s start by looking at the most powerful of these, as epitomized by one of the most famous mixing speakers in studio history, the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube. About The Author: Mike Senior is a professional engineer who has worked with Wet Wet Wet, The Charlatans, Reef, Therapy, and Nigel Kennedy. He specialises in adapting the techniques of top producers for those working on a budget. Since 2007 he has transformed dozens of amateur productions for Sound On Sound magazine’s popular Mike Senior column, proving time and again that you can achieve commercial-grade results with affordable gear — once you know how! Published by Focal Press, a division of Taylor & Francis Figure 8.7 A couple of good stereo adjustment and metering utilities, DDMF’s StereooeretS (left ) and Flux’s Stereo Tool (right ). Timing and Tuning Adjustments Chapter 6 part you decide to latch on to, though, you should naturally ensure that the quality and consistency of its groove are as good as possible before you start lining anything else up to it. This is the part of the timing-correction process where there’s the greatest risk of oversanitizing things, but fortunately there are a few guidelines that help ward off this undesirable outcome. Get hold of a proper Auratone-substitute of some kind, and set up a convenient method of listening to it in mono so that you get into the habit of using it that way. n Buy a pair of good studio headphones, if possible something at the top of the range so that you can do meaningful mix work when speakers aren’t an option. n Find some suitable grotbox speakers.

Part 3: Balance

Part 2 Mix Preparation can fade the kit up further in the mix before it has trouble blending. Tuning is not just a musical issue; it’s an important mixing issue too. However, although unmixably wayward tuning is the most common ailment in low-budget environments, there’s also a significant minority of small-studio practitioners who over-egg the pudding by insensitive use of available pitchcorrection tools, and that pratfall is just as capable of hobbling the mix by squeezing all the musical life out of it. “Something perfectly in time, something perfectly in tune, could be perfectly boring,” warns Steve Churchyard.5 Steering a course between these two extremes is the art of tuning correction, and the remainder of this chapter offers advice for maintaining this desirable trajectory. To begin, there is little excuse these days for inappropriate side effects of pitch correction to be audible in a final mix. Again, the built-in pitch processing within current-generation DAW systems is good enough for a large proportion of applications, and excellent third-party software is comparatively affordable for those who feel their work requires more advanced tools or increased processing fidelity. It’s not the tools that are the problem—you’ve just got to understand how get the best out of them. Midrange Focus First things first: the Auratone is portless, and we’ve already discussed at length the implications of that in Chapter 1. The next crucial Discover how to achieve release-quality mixes even in the smallest studios by applying power-user techniques from the world's most successful producers.

Sound On Sound Technical Glossary: Masses of useful info here, especially if you’re just starting out.Amsterdam • Boston • Heidelberg • London • New York • Oxford • Paris San Diego • San Francisco • Singapore • Sydney • Tokyo Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier