Audio Production Tips

Getting the Sound Right at the Source

Peter Dowsett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317614203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Audio Production Tips: Getting the Sound Right at the Source provides practical and accessible information detailing the production processes for recording today's bands. By demonstrating how to "get the sound right at the source, " author Peter Dowsett lays the appropriate framework to discuss the technical requirements of optimizing the sound of a source. Through its coverage of critical listening, pre-production, arrangement, drum tuning, gain staging and many other areas of music production, Audio Production Tips allows you to build the wide array of skills that apply to the creative process of music production. Broken into two parts, the book first presents foundational concepts followed by more specific production advice on a range of instruments.

Key features:

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• Important in-depth coverage of music theory, arrangement and its applications.

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• Real life examples with key references to the author's music production background.

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• Presents concepts alongside the production of a track captured specifically for the book.

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• A detailed companion website, including audio, video, Pro Tools session files of the track recording process, and videos including accompanying audio that can be examined in the reader's DAW.

Please visit the accompanying companion website, available at www.audioproductiontips.com, for resources that further support the book's practical approach.

1
Production Philosophies, Your Ears and Critical Listening

1.1 Production Philosophies

As an engineer/producer, your number-one priority is improving your own skills, which is done by listening critically to sources and memorizing their sonic attributes. This first chapter is about how to develop a mindset that accelerates your learning in these areas, and also gives an introduction on how to listen critically. Remember that critical listening for a producer never stops; you never cease expanding your repertoire of internalized sounds.

I am not going to descend into spiritualistic teaching, but there are definitely a few different mindsets that I find incredibly useful to adopt during different parts of the music production process. I feel it is crucial to express these before beginning this course in earnest because these mindsets affect every choice you make during the recording process and also the direction you take in your own career.

1.1.1 There Are No ‘Magic-Bullet’ Solutions

A lot of people look for a magic-bullet solution to a problem. Questions such as, ‘What is the best EQ preset for a kick drum?’, ‘Which is the best vocal mic for metal?’, or ‘How do I record a drum kit?’ all miss the most fundamental mindset of the music production jigsaw. Having some rules of thumb is not a problem, but you should remember that each problem is different. The player’s style, instrument, effects, the microphone and its placement, the room, and the pre-amp all have an effect on each other. Plus, the tonality of the other instruments, the genre and the way that the arrangement progresses also help to sculpt your decision-making process. There are no straightforward answers to any of those questions. The best way to achieve results quickly is to memorize how different rooms, equipment and placements sound, and apply that knowledge to what you want to achieve (aka critical listening).

Even though there are no magic-bullet solutions, there are aspects that can be improved fairly quickly and which provide dramatic improvements to the quality of your work. This involves improving your monitoring environment; improving your monitoring should be your second-highest priority (after improving your own skill set).

Whether you are tracking, mixing or mastering, every decision you make comes from information given to you by your monitoring environment. For instance, if you think that you need to give an electric guitar part more treble so that it pierces through the mix better, you have arrived at that decision because of the way that it sounds through your speakers in that particular room.

Put simply, your perception of the mix is the direct result of how your speakers and room combine to give you the sound you hear.

Problems occur when your critical listening environment is inaccurate; this is the number-one reason why results don’t translate well into other environments. Improving your monitoring environment will improve the quality of your output more than any microphone or plug-in purchase possibly could.

You can improve your monitoring environment in many ways:

• tweak speaker positioning;
• upgrade your speakers;
• acoustically treat your room; and
• move into a bigger room with fewer inherent acoustic issues.

If your budget is small, you will want to start by prioritizing improvements to your listening environment. Information on how to do this is included in Chapter 9: The Critical Listening Environment. I’ve refrained from presenting this information too early in the book because it is a little heavy on physics and mathematical principles – I want to have you hooked first! However, if you don’t already have a basic recording set-up, you may want to read this chapter first.

Before moving on to some of my music production philosophies, I want to further desensitize you to the importance of gear by stressing the importance of another acoustics-related factor: your recording environment.

Just like your critical listening room, the place where you record the music you create also imparts a tonal quality to your productions. I would much rather record through mid-level equipment in a superb live room than through top-end equipment in a poorly dimensioned or treated live room. In Chapter 10: Decision-Making and General Recording Techniques, we will discuss some ideas regarding general mic placement and how the quality of the live room might affect this.

The general rule is: the more imperfect the live room, the harder you will work placing the microphones, and the more you will have to process the signal to make it sound good. This point is particularly pertinent to instruments that rely heavily on capturing ambience. The tonal characteristics and its associated reverb time is called room tone. Drums, acoustic guitars and classical string instruments are all known to benefit dramatically from a controlled and acoustically optimized room.

Because of this, and also the start-up costs required to properly mic a drum kit, I’d recommend building a good relationship with a couple of local well-equipped recording studios that you can dry-hire (i.e. without an engineer) to record such instruments and build that cost into your budget.

1.1.2 Everything for a Reason

One aspect of music production (and life in general, really) that I’d lost track of a little was to actually think about what you need to do before you do it. I realized that I was stuck in a workflow, adding plug-ins, setting up the same mics, editing drums in the same way, all out of routine. I first noticed this behavioural pattern in my use of dynamic processing. I’d stopped listening to what was required and had started adding compressors and limiters without considering the effect of such processing. Now while I believe that 90 per cent of the time, dynamic control is needed, I should never have taken this as a given.

• Listen
• Analyse
• Process

In that order!

1.1.3 Vision Means Progress

Whatever your role is in a production, what really counts is your vision. This relates heavily to the principal above (listen, analyse, process) and also the development of your critical listening skills. You are no good to anyone if you don’t have a vision. For the producer and mixer, this vision comes with the territory, but even the tracking engineer should have vision. For instance, the producer might say, ‘I want this electric guitar to sound like The Smiths,’ and the engineer must then work out the guitar, amp, effects and microphone combination to make it work. This takes vision. As long as you are constantly developing your analytical skills and doing everything for a reason, your ability to anticipate what a track needs will improve. With commitment, this improvement will grow at an astonishing rate.

1.1.4 Some Golden Oldies

If you have read a few things about music production, the chances are you will have heard these pearls of wisdom.

Get the Sound Right at Source

You wondered when I’d get to this, didn’t you? From the outset, aim to press record only when everything sounds as you intend it to. Then every subsequent decision will be made wisely and precisely. Remember, before you start to think about microphone selection and position, think about the player, instrument, amplifier and any in-line effects. Before you start using hardware EQs and compressors, experiment with microphone selection and placement. The general rule of thumb is that the earlier you correct an issue, the more natural the sound will be. Do not underestimate the power of correct mic placement. It is often overlooked, but in my experience it is far more important to find the ‘sweet spot’ than it is to have the best microphone, pre-amp and character compressor.

It’s Not All about the Equipment

One of the big questions I get asked a lot is about specific gear or software. A lot of the time, I rely on a trusty £80 Shure SM57, not some £3,000 boutique microphone. I am also a Pro Tools user – why? Because I learnt it, inside out, first. That is the only reason I choose to use it; all the major DAWs are capable of getting commercial-grade results. So stop worrying about your equipment and concentrate on developing your skills to maximize the quality of your results. Besides, until you have sorted out your room and monitoring, any gear purchase is not the right way to spend your money. The chances are, if you can’t afford to buy a piece of equipment, you aren’t at the right stage of growth to warrant its purchase. So don’t make excuses for bad results!

If It Sounds Good, It Is Good

This was a phrase coined by Duke Ellington (along with a similar incarnation by Joe Meek), and whichever way you look at it, this phrase is true. In one sense, it could mean that if it sounds right, who cares what it looks like? In the DAW age, we are used to looking at graphical representations of the processing we are doing to the signal. It is human nature to want things to be neat and tidy. Fight this urge and learn to use your ears. That is not saying that you should never take note of the graphical representations. Use them to reinforce what your ears are already telling you, rather than overruling them. In another sense, this phrase could mean that you should know when to break the rules. For instance, on a recent mix that I completed, I was tweaking the Little Labs IBP phase alignment tool on a ribbon mic that I’d been using in conjunction with an SM57 on a distorted electric guitar. I rotated the phase until it sounded right for the mix. It turned out the signals were slightly out of phase, resulting in a bottom end dropout that ‘hollowed’ out the mix and gave the bass guitar more clarity and space. This could be viewed as bad practice, and that I should have preserved phase and used an EQ to cut those unwanted frequencies, but it sounded right, and I followed this instinct. If this example sounds like gobbledygook, then you are reading the right book!

Don’t Leave It to Fix It in the Mix

A by-product of the Internet generation is the prevalence of online mix tutorials. Sure, learning to mix properly is fun and pivotally important to the overall result. However, these recording sites often give a lot of attention to mixing, thus inadvertently shifting importance from creating better sounds at source to problem-solving at mixdown. The reality is that mixing is no more important than any of the other stages in music production; it is just the time where the recording process is usually judged to be a success or failure.

If you are recording and mixing your own projects, you need to be aware that a lot of your problems at mixdown will actually be caused by inherent errors in the tracking and arrangement stages.

A fantastic mix starts with fantastic tracking. Your favourite records started out with some of the finest tracking engineers and producers at the helm. Without them, the mix engineers wouldn’t look anywhere near as good as they do.

Half the Job Is Managing Social Situations

Finally, it shouldn’t be underestimated how much of your job is reliant on your social skills. This is not only to entice people to record with you, but also to keep morale up and get the best out of the performers. Recording can bring the best and worst out in a band, and you need to know the right thing to say at the right time. This might be a white lie to keep morale high; it might be a diplomatic way of telling a band member to change a part; it might be an encouraging or entertaining word that re-energizes the mood and gets the band ‘vibing’ again. In whatever way possible, you need to get the best out of these people, and if you can predict and ease potential conflicts before they happen, so much the better.

A perfect example of this was on a recent record I produced. The lead guitarist was a fantastic talent and a very inventive player, but he loved virtuosity and was somewhat attached to his selection of gear. How do you go about explaining to a guitarist that instead of playing scintillating solos on an Ibanez through a high-gain amp, he should strip back to a Les Paul on a crunch setting and play with more feel, because it would be better for the song? First, I had to work out what the rest of the band thought about my ideas and also his playing style.

Once I realized that the other band members were in agreement with my analysis of the situation, I had to analyse whether this person was going to be hesitant or reluctant to change. Hesitance and/or reluctance to trust the producer’s instincts can be born of an elitist attitude, insecurity or the player simply wanting his or her personality to be heard. In this case, it was the last option (though, most often, it is one of the other two). To get the most out of him, I instructed the rest of the band to leave the studio while we worked on his lead parts. I sat him down and told him that I believed the songs are the most important part of any record, and that, in my opinion, the majority of the songs didn’t suit that style of playing. Note: in my opinion, it’s always better for the producer to be the bad guy than to risk dividing band members against each other. As expected, he was averse to change because he had spent so much time perfecting those riffs and so much of his own hard-earned cash buying that equipment. I responded by saying that I was not trying to dumb him down, and that there would be areas where he could unleash some virtuosity, but that he should at least try to embrace...