Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio (Sound On Sound Presents...)

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For a number of other monitoring requirements, however, there are more modest systems that can actually outperform even a decent small-studio nearfield rig, simply by virtue of being better adapted to specific duties. This chapter introduces some of these additional systems, specifically the ones you can’t afford to do without if you’re seriously planning on competing with the big guns. Let’s start by looking at the most powerful of these, as epitomized by one of the most famous mixing speakers in studio history, the Auratone 5C Super Sound Cube. Figure 7.2 A static arrangement can undermine the structure of your song, so try to prune your parts to emphasize each section with some kind of arrangement change. An example of this would be to mute the lighter-shaded parts in the hypothetical arrangement shown here. Figure 5.4 Multing the lead vocal part, as in this screen grab, is common practice, because it allows you to adapt your mix processing to different sections of the arrangement. Preemptive Strikes at the Low End Despite what all these workarounds have to offer users of small studios, there will inevitably be some unwelcome degree of guesswork involved when crafting the low end of a mix unless you have at least some access to a reasonably well-behaved, full-range nearfield system. Faced with this uncertainty, then, the canny engineer will employ a certain amount of preemptive processing to avoid any low-end problems that the available monitoring can’t adequately detect, and will also deliberately craft the final mix so that it responds well to mastering-style adjustments should aspects of the low-end balance prove, with hindsight, to have been misjudged.

Get hold of a proper Auratone-substitute of some kind, and set up a convenient method of listening to it in mono so that you get into the habit of using it that way. n Buy a pair of good studio headphones, if possible something at the top of the range so that you can do meaningful mix work when speakers aren’t an option. n Find some suitable grotbox speakers. great way to start building your knowledge. The two books cover just about everything you need to get your home studio up and running. Book Review of ‘Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio’ by Mike Senior Mineral-Fiber Bass Traps The best all-purpose tactic is to damp down the room modes as much as you can using low-frequency absorbers, often called bass traps. The downside here, though, is that bass traps need to be dense and bulky to do their job properly. As Eric Schilling notes, foam simply isn’t up to the task: “Most people think that treating a room simply means going to a music store and buying foam. But if it’s essentially a square room, it doesn’t matter if you have some foam in the corner and a few pieces on the wall—you still won’t be able to hear bass to save your life!”8 The most commonly used alternative is large slabs of highdensity mineral fiber, which offer much better low-frequency absorption. Placing the panels close to a given room boundary provides broadband absorption of all the associated dimension’s room modes, and (much as withIf you encounter any studio-related technical term you don’t understand, you should find an explanation of it in one of the following well-maintained glossaries: Delay-based Effects: Another group of processes which involve overlaying one or more echoes onto the signal. Where these effects become complex, they can begin to artificially simulate the reverberation characteristics of natural acoustic spaces. Whatever you actually sit the speakers on, their exact positioning is also critical to getting good audio reproduction. You should try wherever possible to aim the speakers directly at the listening position. A speaker’s frequency response is measured on axis (i.e., from directly in front of it), so if you listen off axis, you won’t be hearing what the designer intended you to—high frequencies are more directional than low frequencies, so high-end details in particular tend to suffer. Moving around your listening room should amply demonstrate these effects with any full-bandwidth music mix, but if you want to hear the phenomenon at its starkest, then try listening to a constant full-range test signal such as my PinkNoise file through just one of your speakers. These aren’t just miniscule sonic niceties we’re talking about. High frequencies are also easily shadowed by physical objects, so make sure you can actually see the drivers you’re listening to. Aiming the speakers isn’t just about the horizontal plane either, because vertical alignment is usually even more important, for a couple of reasons. The first is that on most nearfield monitors, the cabinet is profiled around the tweeter to create what’s called a waveguide, which is designed to horizontally disperse the jet of high frequencies more widely and thereby increase the size of the optimum listening area (or “sweet spot”). Although waveguides can be quite effective at this, they don’t usually do the same job for the vertical high-frequency dispersion and can even make it narrower. But the second reason is that most nearfield monitors have more than one driver in them, with each driver in a different vertical position. A dedicated bit of circuitry or DSP (called a crossover) within the speaker splits the incoming signal’s frequency range between the different drivers at factory-specified boundaries (called crossover frequencies). Although ideally the crossover should therefore prevent any overlap between the frequency output of the different drivers, the truth is that there is inevitably a small spectral region around each crossover frequency where two drivers are both contributing significant levels at the same time. If the distance from each driver to the listening position isn’t the same, then the signals Figure 6.6 It’s tempting to use real-time pitch correctors like these as a set-and-forget process, but this rarely produces musical or transparent-sounding results.

Figure 4.6 Two possible mix-tonality references: Madonna’s “Sorry” (from Confessions on a Dance Floor) has a lot of top end, whereas Pussy Cat Dolls’ “Taking over the World” (from Doll Domination) has a lot of low end. 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. 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 particular speakers sound, so don’t get too uptight about minute differences No monitors are in tone between speakers. Go for something that truly “neutral,” and every appeals to you, and then concentrate on tuning professional engineer you ask your ears to how your chosen model responds will have his or her own personal in your own control room. “You’ve got to be taste in this department. Part of careful about getting new monitors,” advises the job of learning to mix is getting Dave Way. “You’ve got to break them in and accustomed to the way your get to know them before you start to rely on own particular speakers them.”3 Part of doing this involves referring to a sound. set of reference recordings with which you’re familiar (discussed more in Chapter 4). Figure 1.9 This diagram shows how you might sensibly distribute a dozen 10cm  60cm  120cm mineral-fiber acoustic panels within a modestly sized control room to tame typical room-mode problems. By strategic, I mean that the author has a vision to which all the advice of the book is oriented: producing commercial grade audio mixes. Yes, there are lots of tactical tips sprinkled throughout the text, and they're quite helpful, but these are always in service to the greater goal. This is not a 'mixing tips' book, per se - it's something much better than that, a mixing strategy book. Using Nearfield Monitors Chapter 1 from the different drivers will arrive at the listening position at different times (or “out of phase” in geek-speak), and this gives rise to a potentially serious frequencycancellation effect called comb filtering.Or perhaps you might edit that guitar part so that it only plays at those moments when one of the other parts doesn’t really demand the listener’s full attention—perhaps while the singer’s taking a breath or the pianist is indulging Building the Raw Balance.................................................119 9 Compressing for a Reason................................................143 10 Beyond Compression........................................................163 11 Equalizing for a Reason....................................................171 12 Beyond EQ.......................................................................191 13 Frequency-Selective Dynamics..........................................203 14 The Power of Side Chains.................................................219 15 Toward Fluent Balancing..................................................225 l Using Nearfield Monitors Chapter 1 well, so it’s not just porting side effects you’re seeing here.) The less well-controlled a monitor’s resonances, the less easily you can mix with it.