Recording - October 2014 - 32
with a high noise floor, a low bit rate and sampling frequency, or bad A/D
converters. Sometimes-often!-it's simply operator error... poor or lacking
skills in basic audio engineering are usually the underlying and overarching
problems of a lot of recordings I receive for mixing.
But enough complaining about these recordings already! This article is
primarily about mixing, so let's hope and assume we have good-sounding
tracks to mix and see what can be done to make them shine!
room miking for "air" in recordings, and also of hearing things clearly and with presence, so I make use of
proximity, separation, iso booths, and all of the great
tools that EastSide puts at my disposal. I am not a fan
of "fixing it in the mix" or of skimping on the recording process. If you want a record to sound great, you
need to record it right!
There are, of course, times when the record has
been tracked somewhere else, by somebody else, outside of my control. I do a lot of mixing for people that
I never even meet in person or who live in remote parts
of the world; it's more common than ever for me to
receive tracks for mixing that I did not record myself.
I am overcome with feelings of anxiety every time I
double-click on a Pro Tools file somebody sends me.
More often than not, there are missing audio files,
dozens of tracks called "Audio 01", "Audio 02",
"Audio 03" and so forth... The lack of organization
and good housekeeping on the part of the engineer
is the first red flag, even before I press the space bar
and listen to how it sounds!
Then there is the issue of signal chain and gain structure. This seems like such a basic subject that one
should understand completely before attempting any
type of recording. Yet I still receive clipped waveforms
and/or teeny-weeny waveforms with an amplitude of
10% of the full available bandwidth, or even things
that sound saturated even though they don't look like it.
Then there are more complex issues, such as badly
managed leakage or total lack of proximity. Leakage
is fine; it exists, it has a place in recordings, and it
can be used creatively. But you need to know what
you are doing, or you will put the mixing engineer in
a situation where it is impossible to work and there is
so much leakage on everything that achieving clarity
is almost impossible-I remember something like that
happening on an Ornette Coleman recording that I
was once hired to mix.
Finally, there is just plain poor audio quality. In this
day and age of highly accessible and affordable technology, bad-sounding tracks should be a thing of the
past, but you can still find yourself hearing tracks with a
muffled sound, a dark sound (even on bright things like
vocals or strings), a faraway sound, a sound that has a
veil over it, or a sound that sounds as if it was black and
white when instead it should be full color HD. Often this
is due to subpar preamps and microphones, equipment
32
RECORDING October 2014
Let's get the kitchen ready: routing and housekeeping
The first thing I do is to listen to a rough mix of the song, or just open
the tracks I am sent, to listen to what's going on with the song. You will be
surprised by how many people will start working on the kick drum without even having heard the song once!
After I get a feel for the song, I set all the outputs of the DAW tracks to
"no output" so that nothing plays when I hit the space bar. Unless the artist
and I (or the recording engineer and I) have had a conversation in which
it was pointed out to me that they are particularly enamored with a certain plug-in, volume ride, or effect automation that they want me to preserve, the next thing I would do is remove any plug-ins there might be,
delete any volume automation there might be, delete any other automation (mutes, sends etc.) and basically create a blank slate for myself to
work from... basically as if the DAW was just a good old tape machine,
for those of you who remember such archaic objects.
At this point I look at the names of the tracks (which have hopefully
been named correctly, or named at all!) and I drag and drop and reorder
the DAW tracks in the order I want to see them on the screen. If I am mixing on an analog console as I do at EastSide Sound, the order on the
screen is usually the same order as that of the faders on the console. If I
am mixing "in the box" (DAW), as I do in my home studio, I usually
arrange the tracks in groups: drums first, bass next, etc.-but that is really just a question of preference.
While we are on the subject of mixing in the box, which for better or
worse is what the majority of people do these days, we should note that
gain structure becomes possibly even more important than when mixing in
the analog domain. Analog gear offers a certain "give", referred to as
headroom, so even if your meters are in the red, it doesn't necessarily mean
that you are distorting. In the analog realm there are many "types" of distortion, and some types or amounts might actually be pleasant or usable.
Metering and what constitutes being "in the red" depends on how your
equipment is calibrated and how you are metering (VM vs PPM). The red
on the console might not coincide with the red in the DAW, and even the
red on your DAW doesn't necessarily mean you are creating severe clipping just yet. It depends on how much over the 0 dB mark you go, and
on your DAW's particular settings, such as soft clipping and so on.
What matters more is how much you are driving your mix bus. When
mixing in the box, I usually start by lowering the volumes of all the tracks
equally, to about -5 or -8 dB, depending on the material. I don't always
do that when mixing on the analog console, but on occasion I have had
to do it there as well if the recorded material is very hot across the board.
Recording - October 2014
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2014
Contents
Recording - October 2014 - Intro
Recording - October 2014 - Cover1
Recording - October 2014 - Cover2
Recording - October 2014 - 1
Recording - October 2014 - 2
Recording - October 2014 - 3
Recording - October 2014 - 4
Recording - October 2014 - 5
Recording - October 2014 - Contents
Recording - October 2014 - 7
Recording - October 2014 - 8
Recording - October 2014 - 9
Recording - October 2014 - 10
Recording - October 2014 - 11
Recording - October 2014 - 12
Recording - October 2014 - 13
Recording - October 2014 - 14
Recording - October 2014 - 15
Recording - October 2014 - 16
Recording - October 2014 - 17
Recording - October 2014 - 18
Recording - October 2014 - 19
Recording - October 2014 - 20
Recording - October 2014 - 21
Recording - October 2014 - 22
Recording - October 2014 - 23
Recording - October 2014 - 24
Recording - October 2014 - 25
Recording - October 2014 - 26
Recording - October 2014 - 27
Recording - October 2014 - 28
Recording - October 2014 - 29
Recording - October 2014 - 30
Recording - October 2014 - 31
Recording - October 2014 - 32
Recording - October 2014 - 33
Recording - October 2014 - 34
Recording - October 2014 - 35
Recording - October 2014 - 36
Recording - October 2014 - 37
Recording - October 2014 - 38
Recording - October 2014 - 39
Recording - October 2014 - 40
Recording - October 2014 - 41
Recording - October 2014 - 42
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Recording - October 2014 - 80
Recording - October 2014 - Cover3
Recording - October 2014 - Cover4
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