Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio

Mike Senior

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351368803
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Acoustical Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Discover how to achieve release-quality mixes even in the smallest studios by applying power-user techniques from the world's most successful producers.

Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio is the best-selling primer for small-studio enthusiasts who want chart-ready sonics in a hurry. Drawing on the back-room strategies of more than 160 famous names, this entertaining and down-to-earth guide leads you step-by-step through the entire mixing process. On the way, you'll unravel the mysteries of every type of mix processing, from simple EQ and compression through to advanced spectral dynamics and "fairy dust" effects. User-friendly explanations introduce technical concepts on a strictly need-to-know basis, while chapter summaries and assignments are perfect for school and college use.

? Learn the subtle editing, arrangement, and monitoring tactics which give industry insiders their competitive edge, and master the psychological tricks which protect you from all the biggest rookie mistakes.

? Find out where you don't need to spend money, as well as how to make a limited budget really count.

? Pick up tricks and tips from leading-edge engineers working on today's multi-platinum hits, including Derek "MixedByAli" Ali, Michael Brauer, Dylan "3D" Dresdow, Tom Elmhirst, Serban Ghenea, Jacquire King, the Lord-Alge brothers, Tony Maserati, Manny Marroquin, Noah "50" Shebib, Mark "Spike" Stent, DJ Swivel, Phil Tan, Andy Wallace, Young Guru, and many, many more...

Now extensively expanded and updated, including new sections on mix-buss processing, mastering, and the latest advances in plug-in technology.

PART 1
Hearing and Listening

Probably the most reliable way to waste your time in a small studio is by trying to mix before you can actually hear what you’re doing. Without dependable information about what’s happening to your audio, you’re basically flying blind, and that can get messy. In the first instance, you’ll face a frustratingly uphill struggle to get a mix that sounds good in your own studio, and then you’ll invariably find that some of your hard-won mixes simply collapse on other playback systems, so that you’re left unsure whether any of the techniques you’ve learned along the way are actually worth a brass farthing. You’ll be back to square one, but with less hair.

Relevant advice from professional engineers is perhaps unsurprisingly thin on the ground here. After all, most pros have regular access to expensive high-end speaker systems in purpose-designed rooms with specialist acoustic treatment. However, even the hottest names in the industry don’t always get to work in the glitziest of surroundings, and if you look carefully at their working methods, they have actually developed various tactics that enable them to maintain consistent high-quality results even under difficult circumstances. These same tricks can be applied effectively in small studios too. So much so, in fact, that as long as you take care with gear choice and studio setup, it’s perfectly possible to produce commercially competitive mixes in a domestic environment with comparatively affordable equipment. Indeed, all of my remixes for Sound on Sound magazine’s monthly “Mix Rescue” column have been carried out under exactly such restrictions.

But even God’s own personal control room won’t help you mix your way out of a wet paper bag unless you know how to listen to what you’re hearing. In other words, once you’re presented with a bunch of information about your mix, you need to know how to make objective decisions about that data, irrespective of your own subjective preferences, because that’s the only way of repeatedly meeting the demands of different clients or different sectors of the music market. Do the cymbals need EQ at 12kHz? Does the snare need compression? How loud should the vocal be, and are the lyrics coming through clearly enough? These are the kinds of important mix questions that neither your listening system nor your mixing gear can answer—it’s you, the engineer, who has to listen to the raw audio facts, develop a clear opinion about what needs to be changed, and then coax the desired improvements out of whatever equipment you happen to have at your disposal.

Most people who approach me because they’re unhappy with their mixes think that it’s their processing techniques that are letting them down, but in my experience the real root of their problems is usually either that they’re not able to hear what they need to, or else that they haven’t worked out how to listen to what they’re hearing. So instead of kicking off this book by leaping headlong into a treatise on EQ, compression, or some other related topic, I’d like to begin by focusing on hearing and listening. Until you get a proper grip on those issues, any discussion of mixing techniques is about as useful as a chocolate heatsink.

CHAPTER 1

Using Nearfield Monitors

1.1 CHOOSING YOUR WEAPONS

Choosing the equipment that allows you to hear (or “monitor”) your mix signal is not a task to be taken lightly, because it’s the window through which you’ll be viewing everything you do. For those on a strict budget, however, the unappetizing reality is that monitoring is one of those areas of audio technology where the amount of cash you’re prepared to splash really makes a difference. This is particularly true with regard to your studio’s primary monitoring system, which needs to combine warts-and-all mix detail with a fairly even frequency response across the biggest possible slice of the 20Hz to 20kHz audible frequency spectrum—a set of characteristics that doesn’t come cheap.

That said, when choosing the stereo loudspeakers that will fulfill these duties in all but the most constrained studios, there’s a lot you can do to maximize your value for money. First off, furniture-rattling volume levels aren’t tremendously important for mixing purposes, despite what you might guess from seeing pics of the dishwasher-sized beasts mounted into the walls of famous control rooms—most mix engineers use those speakers mainly for parting the visiting A&R guy’s hair! “There just aren’t many situations where the main monitors sound all that good,” says Chuck Ainlay. “The mains in most studios are intended primarily for hyping the clients and playing real loud.”¹ “I don’t use the big monitors in studios for anything,” says Nigel Godrich, “because they don’t really relate to anything.”² You’ll get a more revealing studio tool at a given price point if you go for something where the designers have spent their budget on audio quality rather than sheer power. As it happens, the most high-profile mix engineers actually rely almost exclusively on smaller speakers set up within a couple of meters of their mix position (commonly referred to as nearfield monitors). If you sensibly follow their example in your own studio, you shouldn’t need gargantuan speaker cones and rocket-powered amplifiers, even if you fancy making your ears water.

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.

Another simple rule of thumb is to be wary of hi-fi speakers, because the purpose of most hi-fi equipment is to make everything sound delicious, regardless of whether it actually is. This kind of unearned flattery is the last thing you need when you’re trying to isolate and troubleshoot sneaky sonic problems. I’m not trying to say that all such designs are inevitably problematic in the studio, but most modern hi-fi models I’ve heard are just too tonally hyped to be of much use, and maintenance issues are often a concern with more suitable pre-1990s systems. Speakers with built-in amplification (usually referred to as “active” or “powered’) are also a sensible bet for the home studio: they’re more convenient and compact; they take the guesswork out of matching the amplifier to your model of speaker; they’re normally heavier, which increases the inertia of the cabinet in response to woofer excursions; and many such designs achieve performance improvements by virtue of having separate matched amplifiers for each of the speaker’s individual driver units.

No monitors are truly “neutral,” and every professional engineer you ask will have his or her own personal taste in this department. Part of the job of learning to mix is getting accustomed to the way your own particular speakers sound.

Beyond those issues, a lot of monitor choice is about personal preference, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people prefer bright aggressive-sounding monitors, others restrained and understated ones, and neither choice is wrong as such. The main thing to remember is that no monitors are truly “neutral,” and every professional engineer you ask will have his or her own personal taste in this department. Part of the job of learning to mix is getting accustomed to the way your own particular speakers sound, so don’t get too uptight about minute differences in tone between speakers. Go for something that appeals to you, and then concentrate on tuning your ears to how your chosen model responds in your own control room. “You’ve got to be careful about getting new monitors,” advises Dave Way. “You’ve got to break them in and get to know them before you start to rely on them.”³ Part of doing this involves referring to a set of reference recordings with which you’re familiar (discussed more in Chapter 4).

1.1.1 Ported Speakers and Frequency Response

I have one further piece of advice to offer when choosing monitors, but I’ve deliberately held it in reserve, because I want to give it special attention. It’s this: the less money you have to spend, the more you should beware ported monitors. Such speakers are sometimes also referred to as “bass reflex” or “reflex loaded” designs, and they incorporate some kind of hole or vent in the speaker cabinet that encourages the whole box to resonate in sympathy with the speaker’s drivers. The main purpose of this resonance is to increase the low-frequency output, an aspect of a small speaker’s performance that is naturally restricted based on its limited woofer size. By using a port to compensate for the woofer’s natural low-end roll-off, manufacturers can have a wider flat region on their published frequency–response graph, as well as giving the speaker a louder, beefier sound that’ll help impress Joe Public’s wallet in the shops. Figure 1.1 illustrates the basic effect of porting on a typical small-studio monitor’s low-end frequency response. The solid line on the graph shows the kind of response you’d expect of a fairly typical small ported speaker, with the output remaining within a ±3dB window down to maybe 55Hz. If you defeated the speaker’s port by blocking it, however, you’d find that the response changed to something like that shown by the dotted line: the trace now drifts out of the ±3dB window almost an octave higher, just above 100Hz.

So what’s so bad about using a port to widen a speaker’s frequency response? The problem is that porting also has several less well-advertised side effects that can easily conspire to hamstring you at mixdown. Given the widespread use of porting in budget nearfield monitors, it’s important to understand what these side effects of porting are. On the one hand, this knowledge makes it easier to evaluate monitors objectively when making a purchase; on the other hand, it better equips you to work around potential porting gremlins when the choice of monitors is beyond your control—for example, in a college facility or a friend’s home studio, or if you’ve already spent your speaker budget before reading this book! So bear with me while I look at this issue in more detail.

FIGURE 1.1

The solid line on this graph shows the kind of sub-1kHz frequency response plot you might expect for a small and budget-friendly ported studio monitor. The dotted line shows how the response changes when the port is artificially blocked, thereby defeating the cabinet’s low-frequency resonance. The shaded region indicates the ±3dB “flat” region of the speaker’s quoted frequency–response specification.

FIGURE 1.2

Some affordable two-way ported nearfield monitors (top to bottom): the ADAM A7X has dual circular ports either side of the woofer, the KRK Rokit 8 G3 has a port slot under the woofer, the Behringer B2031A has a narrow port slot on each side of the tweeter, and the Yamaha HS8 features a single circular port on the rear panel.

The first problem with porting can already be seen in Figure 1.1: although the port stops the response dropping off until 50Hz, the output takes a real nosedive beyond that. This means that although the speaker’s overall low-frequency output is boosted by the port, the relationship between the sub-50Hz levels and the rest of the signal is seriously skewed at the same time, which makes it trickier to make judgments about instruments with important low-frequency components. So assuming, for the sake of example, that you’re playing back the sound of a bass instrument that is completely consistent in its low-frequency levels, the perceived volume of its fundamental frequency will still dance around alarmingly as the notes change pitch, depending on how far the fundamental slips down the steep frequency–response roll-off.

Bear in mind that the lowest fundamental from a typical bass guitar is around 41Hz, whereas pianos, organs, and synths are just some of the sources that will happily generate fundamentals in the 20 to 40Hz bottom octave. In contrast to the fundamental, however, the first harmonic of these bass notes lies an octave above, typically in the much flatter frequency–response region above 50Hz, so it’ll be tough going to decide whether there’s the right amount of each of these frequencies respectively. And, of course, if we step back into the wild again, where untamed rampaging bass parts are often anything but consistent, how are you expected to judge when your mix processing has actually reined them in properly?

Kick drums are equally complicated to deal with. Let’s say that you’re comparing the kick level in your own mix to something on a favorite commercial record, but your kick drum has loads of energy at 30Hz, whereas the comparison track’s kick is rich in the 50Hz region. Because the speaker is effectively recessing the 30Hz region by 12dB compared to the 50Hz region, you’re likely to fade your own kick drum up too high, only to discover a rumbling mess lurking underneath your mix in other monitoring environments. Although the loss of low end on an unported monitor is also a problem, it’s much easier to compensate for this mentally while mixing, because the relative levels of neighboring low-frequenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio
• Sound on Sound Presents series . . .
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Hearing and Listening
• Part 2 Mix Preparation
• Part 3 Balance
• Part 4 Sweetening to Taste
• Appendix 1 Music Studios and the Recording Process: An Overview
• Appendix 2 Who’s Who: Selected Discography
• Appendix 3 Quote References
• Appendix 4 Picture Credits
• Index