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

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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. Part 2 Mix Preparation It’s often much less easy to line up the waveform in an external editor’s display with that of your main rhythmic reference instrument, so you can’t readily use a visual guide to your advantage in speeding up the editing process. n The keyboard shortcut support may be less comprehensive in a third-party application than within your DAW, so there’s more laborious mousing around to do. n Although a single sinewave tone will be perceived as a pitched note, almost all real-world musical notes are actually made up of a harmonic series of related sinewaves. The most low-frequency of these, the fundamental, determines the perceived pitch, while a series of overtones at multiples of the fundamental’s frequency determine the note’s timbre according to their relative levels. Logarithmic Scales for Level and Pitch On first read, personally speaking, this chapter was a little difficult to digest, and it did take me some time to set up five separate reverbs to understand the concepts. However, it was time well spent as it truly demystified the elements of the reverb processing, and the power of the processing. Review Summary

That said, on occasion you may wish to offset the whole stereo image to one side, narrow the spread, or reverse the sides. In these situations, some control over the panning of the leftchannel and right-channel audio streams can Figure 8.7 A couple of good stereo adjustment and metering utilities, DDMF’s StereooeretS (left ) and Flux’s Stereo Tool (right ). Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio is Mike's first published book. The title is something of a misnomer because the advice and guidance contained are relevant to everyone involved in music engineering and production, at all levels and regardless of the size of the studio or its facilities. Novices and grandmasters alike will find plenty of interest here. The emphasis is very much on mastering the correct approaches and techniques, rather than how to use any specific equipment or software, and everything is described in such as way as to make it easily transferable across any DAW platform or even to a traditional console‑based mix environment.

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. Information For Newbies: A Whistlestop Guide To Studio Production for those new to the subject, as well as a couple of good Jargon-busting Glossaries.

Part 2 Mix Preparation That said, having heard literally hundreds of amateur mixes, it’s my firm opinion that most users of small studios don’t pay nearly enough attention to timing and tuning touchups, even taking into account the different demands of different styles in this department. This is doubtless partly because these tasks are about as invigorating as watching paint dry, and I can sympathize wholeheartedly there, but it’s one of those bullets you’ve got to bite if you want to compete commercially these days. Those inexperienced with corrective editing also tend to stop short of what’s required because they’re unable to achieve enough correction without incurring excessively unmusical side effects, and that’s the situation I want to try to remedy in this chapter. With a bit of care it’s perfectly possible to achieve adequate timing and tuning correction in practically any mix without giving the game away by making things sound unnatural. Certainly, I use a degree of corrective editing on almost every mix I do, but I’ve never had any complaint about it—in fact, I can count on the fingers of one hand the occasions anyone’s even commented on it at all. Finally on the minor niggle front, the quality of the graphics was up to Focal Press's usual standard - variable. I don't get how a thirty quid book can't offer consistently high quality images and illustrations. Screenshots, as always, look the worst.More Complex Balancing Tasks Multimiked Instruments It’s not at all uncommon in the studio for a single instrument to be recorded using more than one microphone, the idea being that you can thereby adjust the instrument timbre more flexibly at mixdown. It’s especially common for guitar amps to be recorded in this way, for instance. Balancing this kind of recording isn’t dissimilar to balancing a stereo file: Route the individual mic channels to a single mixer channel for processing purposes. n Optimize the polarity and phase relationships between the different microphone signals. n Use a high-pass filter to remove unwanted low end within the context of the mix. n Set each microphone’s position in the stereo field. n Balance the instrument against those already in the mix. n 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.

Figure 2.2 The frequency response of the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube, which clearly shows its midrange bias. 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 signalsCut to the Chase A nearfield monitoring system is a good choice for small-studio mixing. Spend as much as you can afford on the speakers, because quality costs, and if your budget is tight then be wary of ported designs. When choosing a system, favor studio monitors over hi-fi speakers, active models over passive, and accuracy over volume. n Whatever speakers you use, mount them securely on solid, nonresonant surfaces, preferably away from room boundaries. If the speakers have more than one driver, then the cabinets should be oriented so that the drivers are equal distances from the listener and angled toward the listening position. In nearly all cases it’s better for multidriver speakers to be vertically rather than horizontally aligned. For stereo listening, there should be the n Part 1 of Mixing Secrets begins with a detailed discussion across four chapters on how to choose and use nearfield monitoring, including understanding and working around the limitations of budget equipment, optimising the listening environment, and 'self calibration' using commercial music reference material. Essential pre‑mix groundwork is covered in three chapters through Part 2, dealing with timing, tuning and arrangement issues.