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

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Killer Side Effects of Porting These porting anomalies, however, are only the tip of the iceberg, because frequency-response graphs only show how speakers respond to constant fullfrequency noise, a test signal that is nothing like the varied and fast-moving waveforms of music. Much more troublesome is the way that porting hinders Or perhaps you might edit that guitar part so that it only plays at those moments when one of the other parts doesn’t really demand the listener’s full attention—perhaps while the singer’s taking a breath or the pianist is indulging 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 What You’ll Learn From This Book This book will teach you how to achieve release-quality mixes on a budget within a typical small-studio environment by applying power-user techniques from the world’s most successful producers. Using these same methods, I’ve carried out dozens of mix makeovers for Sound on Sound magazine’s popular “Mix Rescue” series, working on mass-market gear in various home, project, and college studios. If you head over to www.soundonsound.com, you can find before/ after audio comparisons for every one of these remixes, and this book is a one-stop guide to pulling off these kinds of night-and-day transformations for yourself.

I'll get the few (minor) niggles out the way first - and these are repeated in my review of Mike Senior's other book, Recording Secrets for the Small Studio. You should read that book as well - in fact, read it first, as it is focused on the capture of material. Get that right and you're in a much better place when it comes to the mix. Preemptive Strikes at the Low End Despite what all these workarounds have to offer users of small studios, there will inevitably be some unwelcome degree of guesswork involved when crafting the low end of a mix unless you have at least some access to a reasonably well-behaved, full-range nearfield system. Faced with this uncertainty, then, the canny engineer will employ a certain amount of preemptive processing to avoid any low-end problems that the available monitoring can’t adequately detect, and will also deliberately craft the final mix so that it responds well to mastering-style adjustments should aspects of the low-end balance prove, with hindsight, to have been misjudged.Invest as much money as you can in your nearfield speaker system, spending roughly the same amount on acoustic treatment as on the speakers themselves. n Make the best of whatever system you can afford (or have access to) by making sure that the speakers are solidly mounted and sensibly positioned and that the room is appropriately treated. Modulation Effects: A family of processes which introduce cyclic variations into the signal. Includes effects such as chorusing, flanging, phasing, vibrato, and tremolo. 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

Cut 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 2: Mix Preparation

Professional recording engineer and regular Mix Rescue author Mike Senior has just written his first book, Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio. The book is published by Focal Press — the same publisher that brought us Bob Katz’s highly regarded Mastering Audio and Eddy Brixen’s Audio Metering, which we reviewed last month — and was written with the aim of helping small‑studio owners achieve professional‑sounding results using affordable equipment. Using Nearfield Monitors Chapter 1 usually be as obviously apparent in their own right when you’re listening to a real-world mix, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and the ripples they put into the frequency response treacherously undermine your ability to judge both the tone and level balance of critical sounds in the midrange—things like lead vocals, snare drums, and guitars. Figure 8.5 High-pass filtering is occasionally provided as a dedicated plug-in (such as Brainworx’s Bx_cleansweep, right ), but it more commonly forms part of a fully featured equalizer (such as Universal Audio’s Cambridge Equalizer, left ). Part 1 Hearing and Listening or deforming under its own considerable weight. Failing that, old carpets can deliver something like the same result if mounted in a similar way and may be a cheaper option if you can get hold of them as scrap. Lower frequencies need larger areas of treatment, so if you feel the need for limp-mass trapping for a troublesome room mode in one particular dimension, then you should think in terms of trying to treat pretty much the whole of one of the relevant room boundaries, even though this will inevitably reduce the area you can use for your studio gear. Because the size of air gap behind the trapping adjusts its absorptive properties, it’s a good idea to mount the matting on some kind of movable wooden frame if possible, so that you can use trial and error to strike the best balance between resonance reduction and loss of workspace. This kind of trapping is a lot less predictable than simple mineral-fiber absorbers, because it is itself to some extent resonant, so be prepared to spend a bit of time refining the setup to get the best out of it. Some variations worth considering are adjusting the fixing points for the matting, as well as hanging drapes, thin boards, or mineral-fiber panels in parallel. It’s not an exact science, but if you’re faced with heinous low-end resonance problems and a meager budget, then it can nonetheless be a viable bacon-saver. In the specific basement room I mentioned earlier, putting in free-hanging sheets of barrier matting across most of the width of the room and about a meter away from the rear wall was able to bring the worst low-end problems under control, and the loss of that workspace was a small price to pay for usable monitoring. An equally valuable part of this section includes Chapter 11 “Equalizing for a Reason”, which provides much the same breakdown, as compression, for EQ processing.

Find out where you don’t need to spend money, as well as how to make a limited budget really count. Studio Recording & Mixing Services: Bring some specialist knowledge on board for your next production to improve the quality of your results, and see for yourself how successfully big-studio techniques can be adapted for even modest studio setups. As you might guess from Mike’s Mix Rescue and The Mix Review magazine columns, he specialises in mixing work, but he can also offer advice and hands-on guidance at the recording stage to avoid many common mixdown problems at source, as his many Session Notes articles demonstrate. Finally, the book is straightforward in the sense that Mr. Senior seems to be free of faddish biases or particular hardware/software fetishes. He's not selling anything other than better mixes. He is simply devoted to telling his readers what works.Mineral-Fiber Bass Traps The best all-purpose tactic is to damp down the room modes as much as you can using low-frequency absorbers, often called bass traps. The downside here, though, is that bass traps need to be dense and bulky to do their job properly. As Eric Schilling notes, foam simply isn’t up to the task: “Most people think that treating a room simply means going to a music store and buying foam. But if it’s essentially a square room, it doesn’t matter if you have some foam in the corner and a few pieces on the wall—you still won’t be able to hear bass to save your life!”8 The most commonly used alternative is large slabs of highdensity mineral fiber, which offer much better low-frequency absorption. Placing the panels close to a given room boundary provides broadband absorption of all the associated dimension’s room modes, and (much as with Panning decisions may be harder to make too, because you need to decide how you pan each instrument’s main mic signal in relation to the stereo location of prominent spill from other mics. In this respect, it makes good sense to create a stereo picture that mimics the physical layout of the recording session, because the strongest spill contributions from each instrument should then remain fairly close to the instrument’s main mic position in the stereo picture. Where an ensemble recording includes stereo files, matching the images of 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

Preproduction & Programming. The music is written and arranged. Fundamental synth/sampler parts may be programmed at this stage and musicians rehearsed in preparation for recording sessions. Figure 8.7 A couple of good stereo adjustment and metering utilities, DDMF’s StereooeretS (left ) and Flux’s Stereo Tool (right ).In general, it’s best to choose full-range speakers designed specifically for studio use, rather than general-purpose hi-fi models which tend to flatter sounds unduly. The speakers themselves should be firmly mounted (preferably on solid stands) and carefully positioned according to the manufacturer’s instructions – usually the shorter dimension of a rectangular room will give the better sound. To present a good stereo image, the two speakers and the listening ‘ sweetspot’ should form an equilateral triangle, with the tweeter and woofer of each speaker vertically aligned and both tweeters angled toward the listener’s ears. Speaker systems with built-in amplification (‘active’ or ‘powered’ speakers) are not only convenient, but also offer sonic advantages because of the way the amplifier(s) can be matched to the specific speaker drivers. 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 Senior's book has a very logical flow and seems to consider absolutely every challenge mixers face. You will get the most from this book starting at the beginning and working your way through it, cover to cover. It's a very concise book and will require time to read because it never let's up giving you valuable information.