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

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As a mature 'student' wanting to cement my existing knowledge of the mixing process, as well as explore the yawning gaps in that knowledge and develop a consistent workflow, I found this book to be almost perfect.

The less money you’re going to spend on monitors, the more you should approach ported models armed with holy water and cloves of garlic! Part 1 Hearing and Listening Each room mode will generate its own regularly spaced series of nodes and antinodes between the A single room room boundaries, and if this means that there’s mode can easily push its a node in your monitoring sweet spot, you’ll resonant frequency 20dB out of hear a drastic frequency-response dip at that kilter, so only a flying pig is likely to room mode’s resonant frequency, whereas if find a good listening position when there’s an antinode at the listening position, several room modes are active you’ll hear a significant level boost at that freat the same time. quency instead. Because each pair of parallel room surfaces will contribute its own independent series or room modes, and most rectangular domestic rooms offer three pairs of parallel surfaces, small studios typically find themselves liberally peppered with nodes and antinodes at different frequencies.Firstly, in the niggle list - the speech bubble call outs are not useful (to me, anyway) as they are no more than verbatim lifts from the text. Fine if the text consists of sprawling passages with no breaks, but this book is usefully broken down into short, titled sections, so the need for those additional highlight bubbles is minimal and they become a distraction. More useful might have been something like another short comment from a respected producer/engineer/artist on the subject being discussed. Figure 8.7 A couple of good stereo adjustment and metering utilities, DDMF’s StereooeretS (left ) and Flux’s Stereo Tool (right ). Low-End Damage Limitation Chapter 3 the woofer’s limited size becomes less efficient at transferring lower-frequency vibrations to the air. As with all monitors and monitoring techniques, you have to take from your woofer movements only the information that’s of practical use and be merciless in disregarding anything that might mislead you.

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. 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 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. 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.Cut To The Chase Whatever style of music you’re working in, if any of your most important parts are recordings of live performers, you should consider recording several takes and then comping together the best bits. Lead vocal parts in particular are routinely comped from many different takes in a commercial context. How you go about recording and compiling the takes can have an enormous impact on the quality of the outcome, so don’t be afraid to adapt your techniques to suit the particular part and performer you’re working with. n Reducing clutter in an arrangement not only makes it easier to mix, but also helps the production appear more varied to the listener. One generalpurpose approach is to think in terms of restricting yourself to a maximum of three main points of interest at any one time and then to weed out as many parts as you can that don’t form part of this main trio—but do bear in mind that the relative appeal of individual instruments can vary from moment to moment, so the identity of the three primary parts may change frequently. Also try to alter the arrangement to give each new musical section its own sound—this will better maintain the listener’s interest and support the buildup of the production as a whole. n Boring arrangements usually suffer from too much repetition, so consider adding some kind of fill if any part plays the same thing more than three times in a row. If you can aim a fill in one part to grab attention from a less interesting moment in another part, then that’s a bonus! If you’re working in chart-oriented styles, then try to provide some new musical or arrangement diversion every three to five seconds to keep the listener riveted to the radio. Treating the bass line as a second melody is also surprisingly effective in improving musical momentum. n If your song ends with a double chorus, but the second of the choruses seems like it’s treading water, experiment with your mute buttons to see if a drop chorus might bail you out. n Modulation Effects: A family of processes which introduce cyclic variations into the signal. Includes effects such as chorusing, flanging, phasing, vibrato, and tremolo. Timing and Tuning Adjustments Chapter 6 choice I prefer to put matched-waveform edits in “m” and “n” sounds because their dull closed-mouth tone doesn’t vary as widely. An independent monitor mix or control-room mix may be available for your studio loudspeakers. Although this will usually receive the master mix signal by default, you can typically also feed it with any subset of the input signals for closer scrutiny by activating per-channel solo buttons. 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

Figure 2.2 The frequency response of the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube, which clearly shows its midrange bias. 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 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. The way studios marshal all these signals is by using mixers (aka mixing desks, boards, or consoles). At its most basic, a mixer accepts a number of incoming signals, blends them together in some way, and outputs the resulting blended signal. Within the mixer’s architecture, each input signal passes through its own independent signal-processing path (or channel), which is furnished with a set of controls (the channel strip) for adjusting the level and sound character of that signal in the mixed output. In the simplest of mixers, each channel strip may have nothing more than a fader to adjust its relative level for a single output mix, but most real-world designs have many other features besides this: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. Figure 4.2 The top graph here shows four equal-loudness contours. One of the things they show is that our sensitivity to frequency extremes increases with listening level—for instance, moving from the bottom to the top contour (in other words turning the volume up by 60dB) has roughly the same effect on the perceived tonality as the EQ plot shown at the bottom. So, those weeny complaints aside, in pretty much every regard I found the book to be brilliantly structured, clearly written (with enough humour to raise a smile in some of the drier sections) and with an excellent progress from one chapter to the next. It is pretty much laid out like an all-purpose mixing session workflow sequence, starting with prepping the material, moving on through balancing, compression, EQ, and so on. It's crammed with useful tips from Mike and from respected producers and engineers.