As the weeks have gone by Mike and I have been meeting once or twice a week to work on the mixing process for Aubergine. We have had a meeting with the band last week to discuss any final touches that they want on the mix. I am going to talk through some of the challenges and cool things we tired while mixing this project we are both very proud of. This blog will address some of the ways in which we made some creative decisions as well as resolved issues we had.
One of this first things we did in the mixing process was use the analogue outboard gear in the 8024 to 'colour' some of the instruments. This was to fit the jazzy old school aesthetic that the band was after. Please check out my blog on this from a few weeks ago to get a better insight into this process! After we used the analogue gear to colour the instruments we continued to mix in the DAW from here on in.
Something we decided very early on in the process is that we would mix this set in mono. This is a common technique used when mixing for a certain platform. In our case the reason for mixing in mono (mostly) was because most consumers will be listening to this via a laptop to go along with the visual element or on a home TV. If we could make our mix sound great by having all the instruments mostly mono then when it came to creating a stereo image we would have heaps or room to play with. Some other benefits of mixing in mono include better EQ decisions, being able to spot phase issues quickly, more accurate balance and its easier to position instruments when up mixed to stereo (audiotent.com, undated). The reason mixing in mono helps you make better EQ decisions is because all the instruments are effectively not placed any where but the centre. This helps you be able to really hear where the conflicting frequency's are between the instruments. Mixing in mono heightens all the adjustments that you make so you can hear the effect that they are having on the whole mix (Senior, M, 2011). This is also why phasing is easier to hear. The audio information is summed together which makes it as a whole louder. Making anything like phase way more prominent. Mixing in mono also allows you to balance more effectively. Because there isn't the separation between the speakers the balance is directly relevant to the whole mix. It is much easier to reference the volumes of each section.
We kept our mix in mostly mono the entire time we mixed. I had never done this before and I think it worked really well. I liked not having to think about if the stereo image was wide enough or if we should pan things differently. We were more able to focus on the tones and sounds. The only thing we had panned were the drums where we place the toms in their place in the kit and the hi- hat to the left also. We also had a stereo keys track in which we panned stereo. We had the stereo flute and trumpet DI signals but kept these mono while mixing.
The set consisted of 5 songs. We chatted with the band and with each other about how we were going to mix it. The idea of splitting the songs in to seperate sessions was defiantly an option. However, knowing we wanted a live studio vibe we thought that we would try something we hadn't done before and work in the one session using the same tracks for each song. The only instruments we recored in the same tracks were the flute and trumpet as they were tracked through the same inputs through the pedal board DI (see previous posts about this process). We separated the flute and trumpet in to separate tracks as we knew the processing would be way different for both of these. This was the first creative decision that we made about the project. Using automation to mix the different songs rather than mix them separately. The main reason we decide this was that we could work with a base processing chain for all the songs then automate the effects we wanted through out the set. This was to keep all the tracks sounding cohesive and balanced the same.
We then talked about the most effective way in which we could mix. Mixing this whole project together we knew we would face some challenges. It was something that we had never had to do before and working with someone so closely on a project we cared so much about was defiantly a huge learning experience. We made some solid decisions about how we would set up our session. For example we bussed all our instruments to their group busses we had: drums, keys, bass, trumpet and flute busses. This set us up ready for our first balance. As we had a fair bit of time to get this right we started with the kick drum and worked our way up through the mix. We wanted to leave good amount of head room at this stage. This would allow us a to use limiters on the individual busses laster in the mixing stage to work into.
"Some engineers prefer not to juice the input gains or thresholds of their limiters, choosing instead to treat the signal as much as possible before it hits the limiter. They use gain boosts, EQ, and compression to achieve the proper tone and desired level before utilizing the limiter to catch peaks.
Other engineers rely on the limiter’s ability to drive input against the output ceiling. Both approaches are valid" (Messitte, 2018).
We used combination of compression, EQ effects and limiting the mix busses to create and full sound. We used the limiters to 'fatten' up the frequencies. Limiters are pretty much compressors that have a higher ratio. Compression is used for many reasons the most common is the squish the dynamic range to allow more space in a mix or to fill out a mix (Messitte, 2018). Limiting is used in a similar way however it grabs the highest peaks of your audio and compresses them down to the rest of the over all volume. You are THEN able to decrease the 'threshold' of your mix and the limiter will bring up the over all volume of your mix bus or track. This is effective as you can set the ceiling to 0 DB or ultimately -0.3 to stop ay clipping from happening in your mix bus. the human ear cannot hear .3 db of a difference in volume that is why the ceiling on limiters is set to this as it allows a safety net of .3 db before clipping. If your mix is hitting 0 DB the track will infect clip.
We were doing this for creativity and to experiment if it would infect suit the style of music to boots levels and catch peaks on the master busses to make everything loud. This was an interesting process for the drums in particular. It took alot of trial and error and level adjusting in the end to make the limiter work in our favour for this bus. At first we had balanced the kit and made it sound rather shiny with some EQ and compression on the individual tracks. After then putting a limiter on the drum bus we noticed something we couldn't hear before, DISTORTION. My heart sunk. We realised that the over heads had a few crackles in them that were now WAY louder with the limiter on the drum bus.
So we had to deal with this issue. We tried changing the limiting and compression ratios on the bus, tried EQ but it was EVERY WHERE! So, we learnt something. Limiters also bring up sometimes unwanted sounds that can severely affect your mix. Why did the over head mic distort? We used some small DPA condenser microphones these are great mics and we were super excited to use them. However there is a catch. They have a flat frequency response when on axis and an SPL of 139DB's! This is huge! However, when rotated off axis 180 degrees...
Look at the frequency response now! I has a massive dip at 2K where most of the distortion appears to be occurring. This is some thing we completely over looked and now needed to fix!
(soundpure, 2019)
We had a fair bit of processing on the over heads them selves such as some fancy UAD EQ's we didn't realise were actually also making the distortion louder. So, after pulling our hair out for a very long time. I tired to use RX to get rid of the distortion. I had used RX in a post project to get rid of some wind sounds a vocal plosives but not for something like this. We tried for about an hour with the plug in transferring the sections of distortion over. It wasn't working. This is because it wasn't an outside noise it was coming from the actually microphone. The RX de-noise was just effecting the over all sound of the drums and not reducing the distortion at all.
We tired taking the over heads out of the drum but and sent them to a seperate one. We also took all the previous processing off them and rebalanced the raw audio files into the mix. This worked better than any of the other methods to fix this issue. In the end the only way to get rid of the distortion was to cut those sections of the over heads. Luckily it happened most when the toms were hit. We had mics on all the toms and there for were able to blend these in and you can not even tell!
I think this was the most stressful part of this project. Mike and I worked through a number of possible solutions and came to a conclusion that worked and the artists had no idea there was even a problem. We learnt a lot about problem solving in the studio and although some of the techniques we tired didn't work for this particular issue they may help us in the future.
We used some basic mixing techniques for the creative side of this project. However, we wanted to keep the integraty of the live performance. The main things we did to ensure we had the performance in its most true form was before we even recored. You would have seen my blog about the pre production side of this project. This is where most of the effort went. We had a solid plan with a detailed pre production document. This is why this project has been such a success over all for us as engineers - we knew exactly how we were going to record this on the day. Despite not having all the information we required from the band (even though we thought we did) on how to record the flutes - we were prepared for anything in the studio. After spending alot of time last trimester in this studio practicing recording techniques and signal flow we were ready to just do it on the day! Getting familiar with a studio is so important before recording knowing how the desk works and having a work flow planned out is the most valuable studio lesson I have learnt. Knowing the fundamentals is crucial no matter how fancy your microphones or the equipment you have is knowing how to use it it far far more important.
So, Some of the creative things we did do with this lovely recording we had included some drum production, a lot of automated effects and parallel processing. The flute player used his pedal board for some delay's and reverbs. We also created stereo delay AUX send for the trumpet and flute so that we could add some more delay during the solos for a more prominent effect. It was interesting working with the pre recored delay from the flute. There was a lot of drum spill that came through the flute mic which is what we were expecting. We ended up with a cool drum delay effects that pops through occasionally. This sounds really great as all the delays were in time. However some times it was a bit too much. We used the digital delay we had created to make a clean delay on the flute by dipping out the volume on the recored track and automating our delay send in instead. This worked pretty effectively. It took us a while to find a delay that suited the vibe of the set and all most matched the delay timing he used.
We used parallel compression on the drums to fatten them up. This is pretty standard and we used it only juts a little bit to bring them to life. We also used parallel distortion on the bass guitar. We firstly had duplicated the bass track and EQ's the two tracks differently one high passed and one low passed. This really gave us some room to give the bass some grit in the bottom end. We used the SAN SAMP plug in on an AUX track and sent the low bass to this. It really gave the bass some more harmonic content and made it a lot less flat sounding. Although the DI signal was really warm and nice we needed a little more 'playing' textures in the sound.
We created a reverb for the over heads that we used to give the drums some more airiness to them as the reference tracks the band gave us such as the KEXP Floating Points video. We used this consistently through out the set apart from in a few intros to the songs where the reverb was a bit too much on the snare that was coming through the over head mics. We automated this so that the intro had about half the amount of reverb that the rest of the track. We also used some reverb on the keys even though they had a fair bit already. We used this to create a bit more space and brightness. We high passed this reverb and panned it nice and wide so that there is some nice sparkle in the left and right sides.
That was about all we used as far as hectic creative choices for the effects we used. Dealing with the whole session this way was defiantly the best decision and we got really great at automating things quickly. This is a skill I now have regarding my protools skills. I think that it will help me in the future when it comes to mixing in creative effects. It was defiantly the right decision to work in the same session as all songs now have their same tones and little inflections of effects for parts that really need them. I think it makes the effects more interesting this way. I feel like mixing this would have also taken a lot longer if we had have worked each song in separate sessions we we potential wouldn't have got the best result.
After we had completed this almost mono mix we started to pan things out. Mostly we just panned the keys, flute and trumpet. This process was fun and we were really able to have some creative input with this. We were using a lot of left to right sweeps for the keys and this worked really well for the more minimal parts of the song to keep them engaging as well as using the effects sends.
We did face some challenges when it came to this process as we did intact face the challenge of a rather large change in balance when we panned things. This process took us about 10 hours after thinking it wouldn't be so hard. We also had to pan our effects along with the instruments to balance everything out. On the first day we did panning we went a little too far with it. We made the piano sweep from hard left to right too many times and same with the flute. This sounded really great on the monitors but in head phones it was just too much. The next session we had we had to pretty much re-balance the entire performance. This was fine we panned things how we knew we wanted them to sit over all. We then went in and for each song panned things for effect. Although we needed to rebalance some things it was great that we mixed this in mostly mono as when we did widen it out it sounded amazing and this was also such a fun process.
We also mixed three of the songs in 5.1. The goal for this wasn't to make the performance this crazy surround sound experience but to just immerse the listener into the performance a bit more. The idea of making the 5.1 panning really hectic and making the music constantly move around was defiantly something we considered doing. When we tried this however it was pretty distracting from the actually performance and didn't really work. So instead of taking things all out fo their busses and writing the 5.1 automation we set up a few simple 5.1 effects. The first one is a 20/40. This is a stereo delay panned the rear speakers. The delay is 20 mili seconds on the left and 40 on the right. When sending busses or instruments to these delays they appear in the rear speakers. This is way more effective that duplicating tracks as there is no phasing issues. You are putting the delays so little off time that the human ear cannot perceive the difference in time delay. We sent the keys and trumpet tho this and automated it to float in and out through out the songs. We also used a reverb only for the rear speakers in which we also automated for effects such as in the solos. We had a room mic which captured the sound of the drum kit really nicely as well as some flute and trumpet we played this in the centre of the back speakers to make the listener feel as if they were in the room they were in the same room as the band. I think this worked really well and isn't too much.
We did some automated panning in a few sections using the 'write' function in the panning window in protools. This allows you to drag the panner live as the track in playing to record automation rather than having to manually draw it in. We use this to created build ups in the songs and mostly on the keys. We mostly panned from the rear speakers to the front. This is a little over the top at times but it was really fun to play around with and I think we came to a happy medium over all with the 5.1 panning.
Overall I feel like Mike and I have learnt alot about working in a team together. We have had to decided on a lot of things relatively fast to make this project come together and I think that we worked efficiently and experimented with a few things we hadn't tried before while engineering and mixing. I believe that this team experience has taught me alot of patience and has really helped with my studio conversation. Having to discuss with someone what you want to intentions for a mix to sound like can be rather tricky so working out some good way in which to describe how we were going to pull things off was such good experience.
I seemed some industry feed back from my professional friends Tyson Ruth. He is the owner of Studio Truth in Melbourne and has mastered a lot of local bands. He has been giving me feed back on a lot of my projects while here at SAE and this is what he had to say about this mix.
"first up it's vibing! bass could use a bit of control and could come up a tad, seems tucked away but it sounds fantastic, the octave/slappy sound gets a bit pokey in some bits early on in the record the hats could use a little balancing with the cymbals, in some parts the hats get pretty loud and the following crashes sound very subdued by comparison little more bottom end on the toms, they sound a lil small at the moment the muted sax(?) gets a bit pokey in some bits"
This was really helpful as we had reached a point in the mixing stage where we just weren't sure anymore. Tyson is going to master this whole set over the next few weeks so Mike and I are going to head to his studio in Brisbane to go through this process with him. He also said he would help us fix these little things up while we were there if we hadn't by the time we went. However, we have directly tried our best to fix these little issues using EQ and compression to balance everything better.
Pretty much we are just waitng now for our video to come back from the film boys and this project will be nearly rapped up! We are show casing at Synergy this week and are keen to share this! This project has been super fun and challenging and has been over all thing else rewarding as an engineer and producer!
REFERENCES:
5 Advantages of mixing in mono - Audiotent. (2018). Retrieved 18 August 2019, from https://www.audiotent.com/production-tips/5-advantages-of-mixing-in-mono/
Q. Should I be mixing in mono?. (2011). Retrieved 18 August 2019, from https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-should-i-be-mixing-mono
An Introduction to Limiters (and How to Use Them). (2018). Retrieved 18 August 2019, from https://www.izotope.com/en/blog/mastering/an-introduction-to-limiters-and-how-to-use-them.html
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