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

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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. your singer from transforming into a chipmunk when you’re shifting the pitch upward. For small tuning-correction shifts, though, switching off the formant adjustment won’t appreciably affect a sound’s character in a lot of cases, and it may again improve the smoothness of the corrected sound. Different offline pitch shifters do vary a great deal in design, though, and many of their parameters are frankly incomprehensible too, so the main thing is just to use your ears while editing. If you’re disappointed with the way the processed sound emerges from its transformation, then take the time to tinker with at least some of the available settings. No pitch processing is perfectly transparent, but that’s no reason to let more side effects through the net than absolutely necessary. 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. Once sounds have been converted to electrical signals, it becomes possible to process and combine them using all manner of electronic circuitry. In addition, the voltage variations of an electrical signal can also be represented as a stream of numbers in digital form, whereupon digital signal-processing (DSP) techniques can be applied to them. Transferring any signal between the analogue domain (of electrical signals, vinyl grooves, magnetic flux, physical vibrations, and pressure waves) and the digital domain requires either an analogue-to-digital converter ( ADC) or a digital-to-analogue converter ( DAC). The fidelity of analogue-to-digital conversion is primarily determined by two statistics: the frequency with which the analogue signal’s voltage level is measured (the sample rate or sampling frequency) and the resolution (or bit depth) of each measurement (or sample), expressed in terms of the length of the binary number required to store it. Sinewaves and Audio Frequencies

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. Figure 2.4 Stereo recordings made with spaced-pair microphone techniques are a common reason for monocompatibility problems. 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 Although manufacturers typically do their best to keep crossover regions pretty narrow to minimize the effect of comb filtering, most affordable nearfield monitors have only two drivers, which means that any comb filtering between the woofer and the tweeter happens in the worst possible place from a mixing standpoint: right in the center of the frequency spectrum, where our hearing is most sensitive. If you want to get a handle on the extent of the damage here, try this experiment. Play Most the PinkNoise file (www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-ch1 affordable nearfield .htm) through a single nearfield speaker with vermonitors have only two tically spaced drivers, and listen to it first of all drivers, which means any comb directly on axis. Now drift alternately about six filtering between the woofer and inches to each side while keeping your vertical the tweeter happens in the worst position constant. You’ll hear a small change possible place from a mixing in tone on most speakers because of the highstandpoint: right in the center of frequency directionality I mentioned earlier. Once the frequency spectrum, where you’re used to that change, drift up and down by our hearing is most about six inches instead, and the tonal change will sensitive. likely be much more noticeable. Although the effects of comb filtering between your speaker drivers won’t Audio Editing Techniques For Timing Adjustment To my mind, a significant reason why a lot of small-studio operators stop short of carrying out all the necessary timing adjustments is that their audio-editing chops aren’t up to the task. The software isn’t really a limitation in this respect,Correct any timing or tuning anomalies in your mix project, but take care not to compromise the musicality of the original recordings. n If you do a lot of pitch-correction work, then invest in specialized software to improve your work rate and sound quality. n Editing is unavoidably tedious work, so find keyboard commands to speed it up wherever possible.

What I most appreciate about the book is that it is strategic, methodical, rigorous, and straightforward. Part 3 Balance You try to set the level for a simple eighth-note rhythm-guitar part, but some chords always feel buried in the mix, whereas others pop out unduly. You’re constantly feeling the urge to tweak the fader. What your mix is trying to tell you is that the difference in level between the loudest and softest chords is too large—or, to translate that into tech-talk, the dynamic range is too wide. You therefore need processing such as that in Chapters 9 and 10 to control that problem before the fader’s going to settle down to a static balance. n By the time you’ve faded up your acoustic guitar to the point where you can hear all the nice sparkly string details, the booming of the instrument’s main sound hole resonance is making the lowest notes sound bloated. What you want is a separate fader to turn down just that section of the frequency range— which is effectively what the tools discussed in Chapters 11 and 12 provide. n

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If an electrical signal’s waveform looks chaotic, what you hear will usually feature noisy sounds, whereas repeating waveform patterns are heard as pitched events such as musical notes or overtones. However, before I say any more about complex sounds, it’s useful first to understand the simplest repeating sound wave: a sinewave tone. Its pitch is determined by the number of times it repeats per second, referred to as its frequency and measured in Hertz (Hz). Roughly speaking, the human ear can detect sinewave tones across a 20Hz–20kHz frequency range (the audible frequency spectrum). Low-frequency tones are perceived as low pitched, while high-frequency tones are perceived as high pitched. Although a sinewave tone isn’t exactly thrilling to listen to on its own, it turns out that all the more interesting musical sounds can actually be broken down into a collection of different sinewave tones. The mixture of different sinewave components within any given complex sound determines its timbre.

Surround Monitoring Before acquiring a multispeaker surround setup for a small studio, I’d advise thinking it through pretty carefully. Until you can reliably get a great stereo mix, I for one see little point in spending a lot of extra money complicating that learning process. In my experience, a limited budget is much better spent achieving commercial-quality stereo than second-rate surround, so I make no apologies for leaving the topic of surround mixing well alone and concentrating instead on issues that are more directly relevant to most small-studio denizens. Figure 8.1 One possible example of sensible mix dynamics for a typical short song structure. The choruses are more intense than the verses, and each chorus is more intense than the previous one. 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. Figure 1.9 This diagram shows how you might sensibly distribute a dozen 10cm  60cm  120cm mineral-fiber acoustic panels within a modestly sized control room to tame typical room-mode problems.

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. 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 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.