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

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Figure 2.2 The frequency response of the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube, which clearly shows its midrange bias. 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

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 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 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. Figure 3.4 The effect of DC (0Hz) on a mix file’s waveform. Notice how the positive waveform peaks are clipping, even though the negative waveform peaks still have headroom to spare. Figure 5.4 Multing the lead vocal part, as in this screen grab, is common practice, because it allows you to adapt your mix processing to different sections of the arrangement.

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

An equally important cornerstone of the production process in many styles is the use of synthesizers (which generate audio signals electronically) and Find out where you don’t need to spend money, as well as how to make a limited budget really count.

Building the Raw Balance Chapter 8 hypothetical chorus 3 is sounding a bit limp, then a good way to give it more of a boost might be to drop the midsection further by removing parts. Maybe the stereo shakers could bite the dust, or some of the guitar layers, and that sax solo was too cheesy anyway. In more extreme cases, you could even cut out some of the core rhythm section, such as the bass or drum parts. Another common target for cuts is verse 1 if its arrangement is currently identical to that of verse 2—without differentiating the two verses in some way it can be difficult to generate any sense of musical momentum through the first part of the song. At a professional level, there is now an expectation that mix engineers will have this kind of creative input, not only cutting parts but adding new ones too if that’s what it takes to achieve results. “Mixers make production decisions all the time,” comments Jimmy Douglass, “and I add music to people’s records when it’s not finished or done correctly. In my work as a mixer, I’m a finisher. That’s what I do.”2 Jaycen Joshua confirms this approach: “Once you get into the upper echelons of mix engineers, you are being paid for your taste. You’re not hired just to make the rough mix sound better. You are the last line of defense creatively, and you’re expected to improve the record. It is your job to change things.”3 One word of warning, though, when working this way: no matter how much you pare down the introduction of your production to allow room for buildup, it’s still important from a commercial perspective that it engages the listener straight away. As Rich Costey explains, “If the intro isn’t great, it doesn’t matter what happens to the rest of the song. That’s something I learned a long time ago: if the song is going to work, the intro has to grab you immediately. The importance of this cannot be overstated.”4 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 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 ). 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. 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.

Part 4: Sweetening to Taste

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. 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. 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 Spectrum Analysis and Metering Another set of clues about your bass balance (and indeed your mix’s overall tonality) can be gleaned from a spectrum analyzer, and there are now so many decent freeware models that there’s no excuse not to use one—RN