This post focuses on the topic of creating a sense of depth in mixes.
It’s not too hard to make things sound big. It’s not too hard to make things sound wide. But it is very hard to do both while also creating a sense of depth. There are a myriad of tools available to the mix engineer to accomplish this, but there are three in particular that, when used properly, can create mixes that you can ‘walk into’.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post focuses on the use of predelay to allow reverb to be added to a sound without muddying it up too much.
A lot of producers are really reverb shy these days. It’s true that reverb can really date material… it was used so much in the 80s and 90s that a lot of what gives modern music its edge is its dryness. You’ll find that simply plopping a reverb effect on a track with often decrease its clarity or, in the case of vocals, its intelligibility. One way to account for this is to reduce the mix or length of the reverb. But sometimes you really want a long reverb tail and a really wet sound. What to do?
This post focuses on capturing ambience by playing back and re-recording sounds in acoustic spaces.
The idea of piping sounds into a space and retracking it isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Before the advent of reverb processors it was common practice to route audio to speakers in reverb chambers to achieve ambient effects. Now it seems rather quaint to do so, but there are a good number of engineers who simply don’t like using artificial ambience. And real rooms offer a very different, tangible process as opposed to the knob twiddling of ‘verb processors.
This post focuses on convolution as it applies to audio - the capturing and reapplication of the qualities of sound.
A few years ago some new-fangled audio processing engines started to leak out of the lab and into the market involving a process called convolution. The name convolution comes from the type of math involved, but applying the process to audio signals provides for some pretty interesting opportunities.
Essentially, the process of convolution really requires two things: deconvolution and convolution. It’s actually a little backwards from the conventional use of the prefix ‘de’, although that again comes from its math roots. Deconvolution is the process of capturing the audio changes imposed upon a signal when fed through an environment, whether that be a physical room or a piece of equipment. Convolution is the process of applying those changes to a different signal. So, in essence, deconvolution would be ’sampling’ the way an environment affects the signal, whereas convolution would be making that sample into an effect, which is applied to other signals.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post focuses on the placement of sounds in the stereo image during the mix process.
Proper use of stereo imaging in a mix is probably almost as important (or even more important in sparse mixes) as equalization, yet it is largely overlooked as an area for improvement in engineers and producers of beginner and intermediate experience. Intelligent panning and equalization compose about 80% of a good mix, in my opinion.
The focus of this post is on capturing SysEx information from external MIDI devices in order to have a record of your presets right in your session or automate the settings throughout the track.
It happens to producers time and time again: you’ve created an awesome synth sound or guitar tone, you’ve recorded the midi part, but when you load up the session to work on it some more your sounds are completely different! Oh no! You didn’t save the preset…
Don’t let this happen to you! There are a ton of cool things you can do with a special feature of MIDI called SysEx. Essentially, SysEx is a way for a MIDI device’s system settings to be transfered over MIDI. This means that you can save the settings to the patches on a synth, guitar tones on a MIDI capable modeler, or automation/device states on a capable digital mixer.
This post focuses on making your tracks sound more dynamic with automation.
Automation has been with us for a long time. Before there were computers, it wasn’t too uncommon to see engineers, producers, and assistants all at the board to move faders and push buttons in real-time as the mix ran its way through the board. These days we have computers to do the handiwork for us, we just have to know when and how to automate our work.
Automation can be used for creation motion, enhancing performances, customizing sounds, and adding flavor with effects.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Apr | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
