Recording - January 2011 - 64

blend the sounds and make magic. If someone blew a fader move or a mute or delay send... rewind and start over! There are no second chances in live mixing or recording, unless you count the second set. If the guitarist turns up his amp halfway through a song, you react. If the drummer is now playing 10 dB louder than he was at sound check, you react. If a cable goes bad during the performance, you react. If the stage monitor feeds back from the singer’s microphone, you react. Usually these things don’t happen on the fly in the studio, and if they do, we don’t have to react. We simply stop the take, take a break, change some levels, make sure everyone is happy and start again. It’s not the same. So live mixing teaches us to react!

Guest editorial by Paul Vnuk Jr.

Live Mixing—It’s Good For You!
While this issue of Recording focuses largely on the subject of live recording performances, I would also love to encourage our readers to consider getting involved in live mixing. My studio has transitioned to a mixerless DAWbased environment. (Sound familiar?) Running sound for live bands keeps my mixing reflexes in shape. We like to think of what we do in our workstations as “mixing”, and it is, but with our dependence on drawn automation curves, precise numeric level adjustments such as bringing the snare track down by an exact 6.5 dB in the chorus, and so on, we have in many ways lost that spontaneous edge that used to be required when mixing on a fully-featured console. “But my studio has a console,” you say. Mine used to, too, and aside from a few occasional vocal rides while tracking, most of my faders sat idly at unity while simply streaming and summing the output of my DAW. If this sounds familiar, maybe it’s time to step away from the DAW and out of the studio for a while, into the unpredictable and often confrontational world of live sound. Why, you ask? Maybe it’s my hopeless nostalgia for the way things used to be, but indulge me. Back in the olden days of recording, with 24 tracks or less, in many ways studio recording amounted to capturing a live performance. Each take lived on the razor’s edge of survival, and if a musician made a mistake, or worse yet, an engineer blew a level, it was time to rewind and start again, and no two takes were ever the same. During the mix, the song came flying back through the board and you and/or a team of engineers had one chance to
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Instinctual equalization is another lesson that live mixing can teach us. Again, in our computer-happy studio world, we can tweeze and tweak the frequencies for days and days with the utmost precision, usually accompanied by graphic visual aids. In a live mix, you will have to make eq decisions quickly and decisively. You will need to learn fast how to compensate for a venue’s sonic inadequacies, you will learn what makes the bass rumble, the kick punch and how to lessen the twang of a cheap DI’d acoustic, and much of this will be on the fly. What’s more, you will do it by turning knobs, sweeping frequencies and most of all, listening. Even if you are using a digital live board with a fancy LCD screen just like that of your DAW, you may find that your live eq-ing choices will be much bolder as you pit the band against the room. Still another valuable lesson that you will learn is that “stuff” happens live. Cues are missed, tempos fluctuate, singers overreach for notes... and yet, if the mix is happening and the energy is right, it can still be a great show! Energy and vibe trump perfection in live performance. This alone can be a refreshing perspective to take back to the studio. Now if you really want to live on the edge, become the guy who does both at the same time—mix and record the show! Often known as board mixes or board tapes (because they come right off of a stereo bus of the mixing board), these one-time snapshots of a live gig are great mementos for bands and fans alike. They have even spawned complete closet industries of their own. The Grateful Dead, Black Crowes, and Phish come quickly to mind. Board tapes are rarely perfect, since what a room full of people hear and perceive is often very different from what goes to tape or hard disc for a repeated listen, but it is possible to strike a good balance between the two.... with skill and practice. My point in all this is that as audio engineers we need to keep our skill set sharp, our ears tuned, and to keep pushing ourselves into new areas. Live audio is a great way to get in touch with mixing skills we might not know we had, and they should hopefully translate to the studio experience by making us faster, more intuitive and decisive. If interested, where can you start? Aside from the obvious—looking at live clubs in your area—many churches need sound people for services and events; if you have kids in school, I am sure their principal would love to find out you can mix sound for the next talent show; or, even more obvious, find a band you really like in your town and become their soundman doing both their live gigs as well as rehearsals. If that goes well, soon you might also be using your recently-honed skills to record their next album! Paul Vnuk Jr. (vnuk@recordingmag.com) is a recording engineer, musician, producer, and sound designer, living and working in the Milwaukee area.

Recording - January 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2011