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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.
Stupid Engineering Tricks
By Roger Nichols
I am getting a lot of calls for help from friends who have built their own project studios so they can do more work at home. When they work at the big studios they have a crew of guys to help watch out for potential problems. When they start working at home alone, they miss a lot of details that someone else was usually taking care of. Most of the mistakes they make are little ones that snowball as the project progresses. One little thing going wrong at the beginning turns into a big problem by the time you are ready to mix. Here is a broad view of potential problems that you can avoid.
Recording
During the recording of the initial basic tracks, important things to remember are; instrument placement in the room, microphone choice and placement, isolation, recording levels, eq, dynamics, and effects on the instrument sound. Each one of these points should be considered "the most important think to remember."
In the control room remember; recording machine levels calibrated, monitors of equal loudness and evenly spaced in front of the listener, console checked for good signal path, oscillator turned off, a good set of headphones for checking details and setting cue mixes, plenty of pre-formatted tape if required by the recording machine, detailed track sheets, and a note pad to keep a log of what happens during the recording session in chronological order.
Mixing
Don’t forget to; calibrate tape machines, hard disk recorders, consoles and mix destination machines, check the monitor balance, check that all outboard gear is passing a good signal, multiple machines are syncing up like they are supposed to, use the proper cables for digital connections, and make sure there is only one word clock master.
Now For Some Details
Instruments
The first thing that effects the sound of the instrument is the instrument itself. No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to make a bad sounding instrument sound good. If you are renting instruments, have the rental company bring more than one so you can choose. The rental companies want your business, so they will give you a choice. If an instrument is in need of repair, have it serviced before the session. New guitar and bass strings always help. Tune the piano and the other acoustic keyboards. I have been in professional studios where they tell me that the piano is tuned once a month whether it is needed or not. I have the piano tuned every day that it is being recorded. If it hasn’t been tuned in a while, have it tuned once the day before the session, and then again before the session. It will stay in tune longer on the recording day.
Instrument Position
The second variable is the position of the instrument in the room. The room effects all instruments more than you would expect. I realize that there may be a place in the room that was set aside for the drums, and another area for guitars and there is not much choice, but small changes in position may be all that is necessary. You may only have to move the drums one or two feet to make them sound 100% better. The bass amp may only need to be moved a little bit one way or the other to completely get rid of the boominess. Baffles don’t really help for low frequency isolation. Bass leakage into the piano won’t be improved with foam baffles, but by repositioning the bass cabinet a few feet, you could end up with the leakage into the piano being significantly reduced.
Control Room
The sound of the control room can be improved the same way. When you are first setting up your project studio, you can set up a pair of monitors, play some music through them, and move them around until you find the best sounding place in the room. Put your console in front of the monitors and you are ready to go. Sonic reflections can adversely effect what you are hearing from your control room monitors. Reflections off of the console, the ceiling, and the walls are the prime factors that effect listening position. Sound reflections work just like light reflections, which makes it easy find potential problems. Sit in the listening position in front of your console. Have someone take a small mirror and lay it on top of the console knobs. Move the mirror around on the console and ascertain if you can see a reflection of the either speaker. If you can see the reflection, then you can hear the sound reflections. Try moving the speakers a little higher or lower so that the reflections miss you. This will really clean up the imaging and sonic quality of your monitoring environment.
Compressing the Mix
With the plethora of multi-band compressors in both hardware and plug-in versions, mixes are taking a lot of abuse. If you abuse your wife or pets or children, there will be someone at your front door very soon to yell at you, arrest you, or take them away. Some of the mixes I have heard make me want to go over to the guy’s house and take his compressors away before somebody gets hurt. Or maybe he should be arrested and put behind 8 bars.
If you want to compress your mixes to death to send to impress a friend, or try to impress a record company, then fine, but don’t mix through the compressor. Print your mixes without the compression and then run the mixes through the compressor as you make a copy. If you want to hear the compression while you are mixing, then put it on the output of your DAT machine. That way you can hear what the compressor is doing, but the mix will be recorded without the compression. Write down the settings of the compressor for recall when making the compressed copies. When it comes time to enlist the services of a mastering company, you can send the un compressed version and let the mastering guy do the compression. The mastering guy has more experience compressing stuff and can avoid the part of the compressing that make your songs sound like sonic road kill. If you want you can send your compressed version along to the mastering guy as a reference so that he can hear how much you want to compress your mixes, but let him set the final parameters. This method is a lot easier than having to remix everything after being laughed out of the mastering studio.
Choose Only One Master
And choose me! Just kidding… When connecting digital equipment, only one piece of digital gear can be the master. All other digital equipment must be slaved to the digital signals of the master piece of equipment. ALWAYS.
Some DAT machines do not sync to the incoming digital signal unless they are in record pause or input. This can be a problem if you are trying to fly something into the mix from DAT or transfer audio from the DAT onto a digital multi track. You may have to temporarily change the master/ slave relationship to do the transfer and then go back to the original master for then rest of the work.
Running Out Of Room
There are tons of digital audio problems that can be remedied just by resolving clock issues. I will touch on more of them in coming months. If you have specific questions, EQ has added a bulletin board for digital audio questions and answers. Check it out at http://www.musicplayer.com. I’ll be waiting.