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

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The latter part of the section on Balance discusses the relationships between frequency and dynamics, and how to manage those. The section also provides some beneficial information on side chain processing. Part 4: Sweetening to Taste 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 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. 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.

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. 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. Your mix project is neatly laid out. Timing and tuning gremlins have been banished. The arrangement has been honed. All your faders are pulled down, and you’re ready to mix. Now what? That unassuming little question is essentially the crux of what mixing technique is all about, and answering it with conviction at every stage of the process is what foxes a lot of small-studio operators struggling to get commercial-level results. The reason so many low-budget producers can’t confidently answer the persistent “now what?” is that they don’t have an overarchObserving ing game plan to provide solid rationale for seasoned mix engineers their processing decisions. at work is very deceptive, Observing seasoned mix engineers at work because they’ll often seemingly skip is very deceptive in this regard, because at random between different tasks. they’ll often seemingly skip at random In reality they have developed such an between different mixing tasks. In realintuitive grasp of mixing workflow that ity they have developed such an intuithey can respond freely to mix issues tive grasp of their own mixing workflow as they arise without losing the that they are able to respond freely to mix underlying plot. issues as they arise without the risk of losing the underlying plot. As such, I don’t think it’s very Mono listening forces you to work harder to achieve clarity for each of the sounds in your mix, because you can’t make things more audible just by shifting them to less cluttered areas of the stereo field.

Sound On Sound Technical Glossary: Masses of useful info here, especially if you’re just starting out. 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.

Book Review of ‘Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio’ by Mike Senior

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 First off, he proudly states in the beginning that this book is based on his research into the studios of over a 100 engineers. Yet, we only get occasional quotes from one or two of them on any given topic. As a huge fan of older Bryan Adams records, I’d kill to know, for example how R.J. Lange or Bob Clearmountain approach a mix. How do they handle guitars? Vocals? None of that is in here. If you’re looking for more meaty info specifically on how different producers handle these subjects, the book “The Mixing Engineers Handbook” has huge amounts of that. Full interviews with engineers/producers on these subjects. 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

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. nPart 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 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 3.1 Coping With Cheap Ported Speakers My first set of tips is to help those engineers who find themselves lumbered with having to mix through cheap ported monitors for whatever reason. First, it pays to be aware of where the port’s resonant frequency is located, because this knowledge can help you to correctly identify obvious resonances in that region as speaker-design artifacts rather than mix problems. You can also make a note of the pitch of the resonant frequency, which will give you an idea of which bass notes are most likely to suffer irregularity on account of the porting.

Part 3: Balance

This section also includes a handy chapter on “Supplementary Monitoring”, something which is of considerable importance to the home studio enthusiast. This chapter provides invaluable insight into the problems home studio owners have that concern stereo imaging and phantom stereo. Overcoming the majority of these issues is swiftly dealt with the introduction of mono monitoring without any loudspeaker crossover circuitry. The conclusion, of course, resulting in consideration of such speaker units as the Aurotone 5C Super Sound Cube. 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. B) Figure 1.5 Two of the most revered mixing speakers are unported designs: the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube (left ) and the Yamaha NS10 (right ). Below them you can see their waterfall plots.