Hey! This week has been a big one! Aubergine is now FINISHED. Only needs mastering now which is happening early next week at Studio Truth here is Brissy. Mike and I are so lucky to be able to be apart of this mastering process and go along and see Tyson Ruth the mastering wizard master our project with us. I have also finished my 5.1 experimental track. Im going to run over some of the recording and mixing process I went through for this track.
The main thing I worked on this week was my experimental track. After re-amping and taking samples I have compiled a mostly well rounded mix. I tracked some guitars in the NEVE on Wednesday by myself which was super fun and I fell like I learnt a lot from doing this. I had to create a work flow that was effective and also fast. I didn't have a lot to track only this 4 minute song however I wanted to do a few takes with different tones and layers to make this surround mix more interesting.
I double tracked the guitars for the first and last half of the song and left the middle section way more stripped back. I used some of my favourite mics to record the guitars as I had this creative freedom and the room to experiment. I first knew that as I wanted these guitar layers panned for surround sound I would need to record them in a way that I would be able to pan them for 5.1. I found little information about recording guitar for 5.1 however, I found this on a guitar magazine blog that sparked some creativity for me.
"With an electric, you can use a close mic the cab, but add another mic up and out in the room. When mixing in surround, take that room mic and place it in the rear surround speakers" (Tozzoli, R, 2008)
SO I thought I'd try this technique. This is a way I would usually track this style of guitar playing any way. I like ambience and have had great results in the past using a few room mics to widen out the stereo image by panning these mics. I used a classic XY technique on the cone of the guitar amp using an sm57 and a U87. This I thought would capture the whole frequency range nice and closely. I also used my favourite mic of all time the AKG C414 to capture the room sound. I used another C414 behind the amp also that I could use to pan to the rear speakers. I put the C414 to the front of the amp on figure 8 polar patter. This was to capture some of the weird reflections I was hoping to get from the glass behind the mic. These are some pics from the day to give to reference of the distance I had this mic placed from the amp and the glass.
I had this amp us pretty loud while I was recording which was fun. But I needed to be able to engineer this while I worked and also be able to use my guitar pedals. I tired to patch through a 'thru' input in the NEVE live room to do this however. I was later informed that this actually doesn't work (sad). So instead I ran a long cable under the door from the amp to my pedal board in the live room. This meant I was in a good position to play, monitor and use my pedals all from the control room while recording the amp in the live room. This was great once I was set up I didn't have to move much unless I wanted to change mic positions. I ended up only moving the C414 closer to the window in the end to get some more weird reflections from the glass.
So I had the 4 mics set up to record this amp sound that I had. I knew I wanted the guitars to sound huge but also weird. I double tracked the chords playing slightly different inflections on each take with this mic set up. I wasn't really sure how I was going to pan them. I just new I wanted to have the guitars in full surround. I also needed them to not clash but be immersive.
I think I made the right choice with the microphones as the C414's capture a lot of nice brightness that I wanted for the surrounds. The sm57 and the U87 just capture the 'guts' of the over all tone.
As far as the mixing and panning went for this part of the project I was trying to find the best way I could pan the guitars. I read a few articles about mixing in 5.1 and a lot of them said something like this...
"The beauty of mixing in surround is that you are no longer trying to slice and dice the frequency bands and minimize the dynamic range to squeeze lots of elements into two speakers."(Cleveland,B.2017).
So, I began with this philosophy. I used my ears a lot in the creation of this project and didn't follow many rules. As for the other elements I used some simple surround sound techniques I had learnt in lectures such as the 20/40 stereo delay technique. This involves setting up a stereo AUX and then adding a stereo delay to it. Set the left side toe 20 milliseconds and the right to 40. Then you pan this to the two rear speakers. This is used in effect to 'put' things in the rears. The reason this works is that the man ear is unable to hear the difference between 0 ms and 20 ms. Therefore there is no phasing issues by doing this but it is however off setting the time it takes to reach the rear speakers. This is more of an 'up mixing technique'. Up mixing is when you have a stereo track and are trying to make it into 5.1 mix. WE did this for AUBERGINE. However I had written a lot of my track for 5.1. I created some 5.1 MIDI tracks even while I was composing. However, I didn't use these because I wanted to re amp almost all of my synth sounds and this wasn't possible to keep in 5.1 format.
I also set up a few different types of surround delays and reverbs. I pretty much experimented with these for the different synths and panning them using automation. I refereed back to a reverb article about a 5.1 mixing engineer called John Loose. He works for Dolby and although this interview is brief he has some good quick inspirational tips, like this one...
"place subtle delay returns into the surrounds, even using an auto-panner to make things move between the surround channels"
I used this technique by automating the reverbs to the opposite side the sound's were appearing on. As 5.1 is calibrated so that all speakers are a stereo pair the possibilities for this technique are endless not only for reverbs and delays but other effects such as parallel processing. I used this effect a lot while creating some of the sounds and layers and this has been my go to technique while mixing in 5.1.
I read this great article which is essentially an interview with some famous mixing engineers and they share their opinions on surround sound processing. I found this after I had been mixing for a while going out of my way to process everything like I would for a stereo mix. This article highlights that also of these engineers DON'T use as much EQ or compression when mixing in 5.1. This was a super light bulb moment for me. I had been EQ'ing guitars and voices trying to make them... I didn't really know how I was trying to make them actually. Everything was starting to have its place in the mix. I had done a lot of panning already and some the more intense effects I wanted such as the vocal effects. All I was doing with the Eq's and compression was effecting how good it sounded and making the filters too extreme. I took off all the processing I was doing out of habit and just focused more on the effects. This worked much better I really forced myself to only use EQ's when I need them!
Overall this project has taught me also. I learn how to mix in 5.1 effectively and also compose music for 5.1. I learnt how to be a composer, performer and recording engineer all at the same time. It also taught me a little more creativity when it comes to mixing techniques and recording. There is a lot of rules out there about mixing and I feel like I broke a lot of them in the project and I think its dope. I also feel like I could do more projects similar to this and only improve the weirdness and niceness of them. I am happy with the techniques I have learnt and the way I managed this project. I have only done a 5.1 mix as I wrote the project for 5.1- the fold down isn't quiet right.
REFERENCES:
Cleveland, B. (2019). Surround Sound Mixing Basics with John Loose of Dolby Labs. Retrieved 22 August 2019, from https://reverb.com/au/news/surround-sound-mixing-basics-with-john-loose-of-dolby-labs
Mixing in Surround: DOs and DON’Ts | Waves. (2019). Retrieved 22 August 2019, from https://www.waves.com/mixing-in-surround-do-and-dont
Rudolph, B. Signal Processing and Methods in Surround Mixing. Retrieved 22 August 2019, from https://www.barryrudolph.com/mix/surround.html
Comments