Tales from the Studio Couch - Faking the Drummer on If 60's were 90's
If you can remember a time before it was possible to record audio to a computer, then you’ll relate to this story and if you can’t you may be puzzled by the idea of managing a recording between a tape machine, a sampler and a computer, often all at the same time.
I worked on an album called “If 60’s Were 90’s” in 1991, a project that fused samples of Hendrix (with the great fortune of having full clearance for the samples) with our band playing plus a number of drum loops running underneath, something that was very popular at that time. The title track has essentially live drums, with a few of our own loops added underneath, but the style of the song really needed the rhythm section to be a little more rigid than the live take we had on tape.
My solution to this was to take a 6 track sample of the real drums at a point in the song where it sat tightly with the rest of the rhythm section, using the then ubiquitous AKAI S1000 sampler. I then auditioned the whole track and made notes on where the live drums loosened up and then proceeded to drop this 6 channel sample across the whole drum track. So far so good, however this was of course totally destructive so I had to be sure to get it right first time and avoid spoiling any drum fills that helped pull the original track along. The real problem lay with the AKAI and its inability to behave as a stereo sampler, something it claimed to be but simply wasn’t.
Until the release of the S3000, Akai hadn’t worked out how to lock the phase correlation between the two channels, so every time you triggered a stereo (well dual really) sample the phase relationship between left and right was different. So on quite a few of these drop ins I had to redo them a few times to get a decent phase correlation of the stereo overhead tracks, not great when the objective was to get them right first time, so the drop in point would get later and later. I think the end result is pretty good and listening now I can’t spot the samples from the originals. You had to understand a lot about your gear in those days, think very creatively to squeeze the best out of the gear and above all, you had to be brave!
Audient User Story - Luke Slater on High Resolution Summing!
Luke Slater keeps it simple when it comes to sharing his mix tips:
"For me the difference between completing a track just inside a computer and getting the channels up on the desk separately for the mix down is huge. Everything I do goes through the 8024 and has done for years"
... and when he says 8024, he of course means the Audient high resolution analogue console ASP8024. Veteran producer Luke is deeply ensconsed in the production of exploratory techno and electronica music, with his Planetary Assault Systems albums “shaking up the scene” over the last three years.
Luke continues to be in high demand, travelling as a DJ with his crew, touring the festivals and clubs around the world. Luke also runs UK record label Mote-Evolver, another guise, a which has had a recent run of very well received releases. As he puts it, “Mote-Evolver continues to deliver fresh momentum to the scene by steadfastly sticking to the twin values to consistent quality and varied content.”
Audient User Tip - Stu Welsh on Source Fader Parallels!
Stu Welsh’s very own Beliefspace Studio opens this month in his hometown of Plymouth, where he’s already started taking bookings for what promises to be a busy autumn. The studio centres around an Audient ASP4816, which is perfectly in line with his aim “… to build a digital studio with an analogue heart.”
Having written his own Foundation Degree in Audio & Music Production for dBs Music Recording School, Stu definitely knows his onions, so let’s hear what recording nuggets he’s got for us:
Use both faders during Mixing
The excellent routing on the ASP4816 opens up more possibilities in the mix stage, and being able to route the DAW signal to both the Long and Short Faders facilitates some creative mix techniques.
Check out the following example:
Press the “source” button on the Short Fader, so the ‘LF’ lights up
Assign a section of the EQ to the short fader
EQ the short fader signal to taste (remember this is post any Long Fader EQ on the ASP4816)
Now, instead of sending the Short Fader signal to the Mix Bus, assign it to a Sub Group via the Routing Switches
You can now use the insert point on that Sub Group to apply dynamics, such as compression or limiting to that portion of the signal only
You can now mix the Long Fader signal, with the Short Fader -> Sub Group signal
By employing this method, you can be quite extreme on your short fader -> sub group processing and mix it to taste with the original Long Fader signal later. Great for adding air to a mix, if EQ alone isn’t quite cutting it.
Stu has even produced a nice R&D style signal flow diagram to get the point across! Thanks Stu! :-)
About Stu
Stu Welsh is passionate about music and audio technology, and enjoys nothing better than filling his time with all things associated with it.
He set up his own studio at the tender age of 21 and quickly built up a wealth of experience recording bands, voice-overs, training materials and sound effects. With this knowledge he went on to teach at dBs Music, where he’s now the Audio & Music Production course leader. If this weren’t enough, he also runs a specialist record label, Fiercely Independent Records, specialising in limited and special edition releases.
Check out the studio: http://www.beliefspacestudio.co.uk/
Check out the label: http://www.fiercelyindie.co.uk/
Studio Tip - Phil English on Mixing Quietly & Translation!
Photograph taken by www.recordproduction.com
Phil English of Alexander Sound Studios gives us two oh-so-simple tips, so listen up!
Mix Translation - Tip 1!
The first is really simple but SO OFTEN overlooked... mix 'quiet'. It's that simple! Things often sound great when you turn them up because your ears and brain start getting excited, compensating and compressing - make sure you still have a fairly flat frequency response and then mix as quietly as you can. If I can't talk to a client while the track is running I'm not happy.
Make it sound great quiet, and when people turn it up it will blow them away!
Mix Colouration - Tip 2!
The second is more of a trick - again really simple though - if you want a listener to be engaged by a mix element (lead vocal, lead guitar, cool synth etc etc) try running it through a high quality mic amp instead of a line amp. You'll be able to generate some subtle distortions without losing clarity (if you are losing clarity you either have too much gain or need to try a different mic amp - I have a personal favourite for this trick but I'll keep that to myself!) Just remember: don't use it on too much in any given mix or it wont have the same effect!
About Phil
Phil’s career started working with and learning from big name producers and artists during several years as an engineer at the internationally renowned Great Linford Manor recording studios and he has worked with the likes of Feeder, Biffy Clyro, Diamond Head, The Coral, McFly and many others...
Phil continues to work on singles, EPs and albums with both high profile and developing acts, most often from his own Alexander Sound studios. Here he uses a DDA Profile - another classic David Dearden designed console.
Connect with Alexander Sound studio on Facebook and Twitter, or share your thoughts with Phil English on his own Twitter.
You can also catch Phil musing about all things studio and production related in The Full English podcast delivered in association with www.recordproduction.com.
“Phase correlation between mics is HUGELY important when on the quest for the elusive ‘perfect guitar tone’. If you need more than one mic to accomplish that sound, here is a trick I do to check phase coherency.
Oz continues:
“Connect a reamp box to the amplifier you are recording. Using your DAW, send a side snare or stick click (anything with an enhanced attack transient) out through your DAW via the reamp box and into the amp. Record your mics capturing this sound, then have a look at the waveforms to see how close they are. My starting procedure is to get the mics’ respective waveforms to all start at the exact same time, then go on from there.
It takes some time to get it dead on, but the results justify the time and effort!”
Oz Craggs runs Hidden Track Studios in Folkestone, where he’s a producer and mix engineer. Saying that, he turns his hand to all aspects of production including mastering, having spent three years honing his skills at Mark 1 Music studio in Kent working his way up from tea boy. At the tender age of 19 he took the plunge to go self-employed, and has been working full time in the industry ever since.
Oz works predominantly with guitar-based music. His experience ranges from acoustic folk right through to death-metal, proving that the skills in the fundamentals of production are not genre specific, although Oz’s better known work tends to be in the heavier genres. The artists he has worked with over the years number in their thousands, with Ben Mills, Feed The Rhino, Mallory Knox, Hildamay, Szjerdene, Yndi Halda and Pay No Respect counting among them.
Check out the Hidden Track Studios website and listen to Oz’s work here
Sum & Difference Monitoring - Reverse Engineering!
Have you ever considered using Sum & Difference monitoring techniques to enable you to reverse engineer some of your favourite records?
We all know that developing our listening skill is crucial as engineers and producers who care about the quality of our craft.
Utilising some commonly found features on mixing consoles and monitor controllers, today's blog entry outlines some interesting ways to help expose elements in perspectives you may not have heard very often.
Mid / Side Basics
So I am sure many of you have used mid/side techniques to record stereo signals, a technique that allows us to capture separate mid (cardioid most often) and side (figure-8) signals that can facilitate control over stereo content post-capture.
In a mid/side array, the individual microphone feeds are combined in a simple matrix in order to produce and vary stereo content.
The left channel is formed by the MID combined with the positive polarity of the SIDE, and the right channel is formed by combining the MID with the negative polarity of the SIDE microphone (mathematical expression below for anyone geeky!).
M+S = L
M-S = R
Check out this useful blog post from our friends Universal Audio that explains recording in mid-side.
Reversing the Matrix
In case you may may have missed this elsewhere, a mid/side matrix is a bi-directional system. This means that if you put in M & S, you get stereo L & R out. Reversing the matrix and sending L & R in, will in actual fact provide M & S outputs.
Now this is not a new idea, even the classic Fairchild 670 had a built-in Sum and Difference matrix to provide dynamic range control over the mono and stereo components of stereo program material (for vinyl disk cutting). Here it was referred to as Lateral and Vertical mode. Mid/side can also be used for advanced stereo processing techniques that I may cover later, but for now let's discuss its use as a listening technique.
Listening in M/S
Many of us are well aware of the benefits of checking our mixes in mono - yes that dreaded 'old school' mentality that we must be compatible with mono broadcast mediums...
Actually, mono mixing has several advantages in terms of punch and impact to the listener - straight up the middle sounds direct and forward, and this is why we place kicks, snares and lead vocals here for example. Ensuring that your mixes have good impact in mono is most useful when you consider that club and festival PA systems are run in mono (mostly) to ensure that each listener gets the same experience no matter where they are stood... but I digress.
Using M/S techniques it is possible for us to listen to our work in difference (side) mode - the stereo only content. This is the inverse picture - the stuff we would normally lose in a mono check.
Listening in this way is a most excellent learning tool that allows you to isolate reverb choices, spatial delay work and often hear 'into' stacks of hard-panned guitars / vocals.
Patching for Difference Listening
In order to listen in side / difference mode, you must polarity invert one side of your mix before summing to mono. This effectively creates a cancellation of the 'in-phase' mono components in your mix, leaving behind stereo only content.
Use two channels on a console for this, or polarity invert one side of your mix in the DAW before summing to mono on a monitor controller or console master section like those on the ASP4816 or ASP8024. If you are in ProTools / Logic etc you can split the mix to two tracks and invert one with the trim plugin and then route both to a mono output to one or both loudspeakers.
You can either listen in mono (dfference signal) on one speaker by panning the signals to the same mix bus (left for example):
Or you can listen in mono (difference signal) on both speakers as a phantom centre image.
Difference Listening
What does it sound like?
For sake of staying copyright free, here is an example using some ambient music entitled iD that I made for demo purposes:
The track is simple but you can clearly hear how much width is in the stereo detuned bass synth, and listening in difference mode also clearly highlights the oddly automated LFO rates in the high synth line. Snare reverb is full of digital splash (listen to the last minute). Panning and placement is obvious when comparing the mono, stereo and difference versions and this highlights the benefit to being able to listen in this manner.
Take this listening further by analysing your favourite mixes! I found it very revealing to take a 'stereo peek' under the hood of my favourite Spike Stent mixes.
Further Listening
I asked several Audient staff members for a mix to analyse that had interesting stereo content and ambience choices. Obviously I cannot post the music online here but they are all available on iTunes (with the exception of Black Dub) and are worth listening to, just to hear what I'm on about!
Steve @ Audient chose Black Dub "Love Lives" produced & mixed by Daniel Lanois & Mark Howard
Listening to this in difference mode highlights plenty of tom tom tone in the stereo overhead mix of Brian Blade's drums, interestingly there is a pulsing bass tone that enters in the main hook section and throbs off and on beat once or twice a bar, this is clearly a stereo low frequency element that cuts into the mono bass guitar line to create an interesting rhythmic texture in the low end.
Trixie's lead vocal is covered in one or two repeats of very texturally dense tape slap / delay and the backing vocal stacks between herself and Daniel Lanois are very clearly balanced and dry in terms of ambience, cutting through the swimming delays and keyboard parts.
Upright piano tinkles are also clearly heard covered in some tape slap delay. Electric textures I would hazzard a guess are created with some loop pedal textures etc.
A cool band and worth a listen in any form!
Luke @ Audient chose Ozric Tentacles "Flying Machines" produced by Ed and Brandi Wynne
This track starts with some interesting arpeggiated synth lines and these work in tandem with some electronic tom tom triggers in the intro to create an epic progressive space. Listening in difference mode highlights the amount of hall reverb on these elements, with significant low frequency decay times in the tom tom reverb, the sort of thing you can achieve when cranking the Bass Rt parameter on Lexicons etc. Varying pre delay times can be heard across all main elements.
Listening to the track in mono shows a much drier centre, with drums and central synth elements pushing through the centre with little mono ambience. Clearly this track uses stereo width as ambient space, pushing time based send effects out towards the edges of the speakers for interesting width and movement.
There is plenty of broadband frequency range energy in there difference signal, highlighting that Ozric Tentacles are not afraid of size in the left and right, however mono compatibility is good on the whole as the drums really push the track from the middle.
Check it out!
Gareth @ Audient chose Kraftwerk "Radioactivity" produced by Florian Schneider & Ralf Hütter
Listening to the classic Kraftwerk "Radioactivity" highlights some masterful sound design, with reverbs in the stereo difference taking on a metallic and plate-like texture, which would certainly be supported by the era in which is was made. EMT140 plates sound like a metallic halo around percussive sources to me, and I was instantly reminded of that.
The big splashes of reverb on the snare hits are very well isolated in the difference signal, which shows Kraftwerk playing with explosive space and to me the reverb on the snare sounds like very early digital reverb with plenty of 'splash' and quite often the reverbs are either gated or manually muted in the mix at the end of the tails.
An interesting listen indeed!
Tom @ Audient chose Madonna "Frozen" produced by William Orbit, mixed by Mark 'Spike' Stent
Listening to this classic mix highlights lots of strings (well placed in a hall setting) in the side signal. The synth blips and swells in the intro are quite dry and create 'light and shade' with the more ambient elements.
When the vocal hits, something really interesting is exposed. The Madonna vocal sounds expansive and huge in stereo and listening in difference mode shows 100% wet hard panned reverb and delay trails with a chopped up, delayed characteristic. This illustrates some rhythmic gating or automation chops to provide emphasis to the sibilant, whispy air in the vocal delivery that suits the style and content of the track. Clever vocal processing indeed.
The reverbs are clearly modulated with some kind of chorus, hinting at Lexicon 480L, however there is something about the tails and topend that push me towards this being a blend of a plate and a digital reverb.
Also interestingly in Stent mixes sub bass is mostly very well controlled, big yet tight with plenty of stopping power and it rarely finds it's way into the stereo difference for any length of time, suggesting that Stent likes to mix the top end open and wide and the bottom end tight and clean. However listening to the amount of short, transient sub drops that hit the stereo difference signal in Frozen shows that Stent pushed the LF out wide when needed for huge impactful low end.
Have you ever found yourself looking for more glue and cohesiveness in your mixing?
Have you ever found yourself struggling to get great movement between parts yet still produce tight and dense mixes like engineers such as Michael Brauer?
You may be mixing on a console such as ASP4816 or 'in the box' and probably like many, you have tried inserting a bus compressor over your mix to 'gel' all of the elements together as one.
When strapping a compressor over your stereo bus at the end of a mix, internal song balances often change too much. Typically you can't get the amount of compression to really glue the track together before it all falls apart as many of us mix quite openly and transients are very present in the digital age. Often 1-3 dB is always about as far as you can take it...otherwise you ask a lot of the bus compressor and many types don't handle the squeeze cleanly.
To avoid this you may have tried mixing into a bus compressor from the beginning of your mix - something which needs be learnt - as the sweet spot is so tweakable but it does produce some interesting results considering all mix balances are based on a two-way fight - up vs down... this forces you into a sweet spot!
Mixing into Multiple Buses
If you have ever heard a Coldplay, John Mayer or Ben Folds record, you will have heard a Michael Brauer mix. Michael has developed a technique which involves multple stages of series/parallel compression at a channel level INTO a series of 4-5 stereo mix buses that contain mix bus compressors for specific ENERGY groups in a mix. These are full bandwidth buses but effectively elements are grouped into energies that occupy the low end (bottom), mid range (centre), colour (distortion) of the mix and high end (air).
You can read Michael's explanation here or refer to Mike Caffrey's article in Tape Op here.
Movement, Groove & the Multibus
The goal with multi-bus mixing is to have groups of elements glued together but then freely moving against other groups within the mix. This sounds a lot like sub-mixing and it is... UNTIL you start routing elements into MULTIPLE buses as compression groove control elements. Imagine a bass guitar track assigned to the bottom bus with the drums, yet by adding some bass guitar to the centre bus where your guitars live, you can provide some shared movement in the overall guitar stack but the bass is also driving the drums and bottom end compression. Cymbals and reverbs may sit in the air (high end) bus along with vocals and therefore you can see this as a stretching soundstage for any element routed into multiple directions with plenty of range for style and choice.
Mixing into one bus is like mixing into a 2D box. Stretch that box up, down, sideways and front to back and you have a large cube with plenty of depth in your mix.
Here's a diagram to illustrate (feel free to experiment) but if attempting to do this 'in the box' watch out for phase shift between channels as some plug-ins still really don't work well in parallel even with fully delay compensated mixing platforms.
Read this for an explanation of what Michael Brauer has on his buses.
Any console with a good number of buses can be set-up for multi-bus mixing and as you are mixing into your best bits of outboard gear strapped across the buses, more elements get their benefit and therefore it kind of maximises your studio investment and potential gains.
ASP4816 or 8024 are hugely suited to this style of mixing. With 16 or 24 multitrack buses, outboard compressors can be patched into both channel inserts and bus outputs (routed back to short faders), it is possible to process channels as you would normally, but also hit a bus matrix switch and parallel compress a lead vocal etc. HOWEVER when you run the channel outputs into the first 8 subgroups setup as Bus A, Bus B, Bus C and Bus D you can use the matrix swtiches to access the MULTIBUS.
This is a feature typically only found on heritage large format consoles such as the SSL4000E/G, SSL9000J/K, Neve VR/88R etc which makes the Audient ASP consoles very well featured indeed!
Demo Mix
I experimented with this idea and produced the following rough mix for demonstration purposes here. I am aware that the low end is a bit 'loose' and out of control in places - translation issues from the office!
This mix had all channels 'in the box' feeding 4 stereo and 2 mono DAC outputs into Bus A - D + 2 processing chains and then finally combined into a simple 10 into 2 mixer.
Bus A: Air - Stereo Neve EQ and SSL VCA bus compressor
Bus B: Bottom - Elysia Xpressor and SSL Stereo G-EQ
Bus C: - Stereo Toft FET compressor
Bus D: - Distortion Thermionic Culture Rooster
Mono Punch - DBX160 (up the middle)
Mono Sustain - 1176LN (up the middle)
I hope this gives you some food for thought and also highlights just how powerful the routing capability is on an analogue console such as ASP4816 or ASP8024. To me the multibus mix has more thump, glue, depth and space while the ITB rough mix is 2 dimensional in comparision. Naturally great mixes can be done on both platforms, but the effect of the multibus is strong and it can be achieved in a hybrid mixing system very well indeed!
Music in the sample mix is taken from Mix Off.
Artist: Hot Rain
Song: We Dem People (in case you missed that!) ;-)
Posted for educational purposes only
The multibus mix and ITB mix have the same channel processing, just the mix buses change
For more discussion of Michael's technique watch his recent Pensado's Place videos.
