Unne Lilijeblad - Mix Engineer

Mixing in Surround 
Now what about surround? Obviously, the panning of mono sources in a surround mixing environment works very similarly to the way it works in stereo. It gets more complex of course, as the panner has to divide signals between more speakers, and you now have a three dimensional sound field with both an x and a y-axel, rather than just a simple two dimensional field between left and right. The panning via delay technique works too of course, and naturally, the two can be combined.

There are issues with mixing this way though. Since the same signal gets sent to many speakers (which is what happens with the surround panners built into most DAW software and Digital Consoles capable of surround mixing) the location of the listener becomes very important. Unless he or she stays exactly in the center of the surround field, you’re going to end up with arrival time differences between the signals originating from the different speakers. And this time, these are not intentional differences, decided upon by the engineer, but rather, they depend upon the listener’s location which, of course, the engineer cannot control, resulting in your pan positions changing as the listener moves. And as you have more speakers reproducing the same signal, you’ll get more comb filtering effects, and ultimately a more cluttered and less clean sound.

But how about true surround recording techniques equivalent to the X/Y and ORTF methods used for stereo? Yes – There are a number of surround recording techniques in use, most of them based on, or extensions of, existing stereo recording techniques. The limiting factor with these methods however, is that the panning position for audio sources largely gets decided by how they were placed in the space where the recording took place. Sure, levels sent to the different surround speakers can be tweaked and manipulated during mixing, but only so much, because at some point, where the level gets too low or too high in some of the speakers, you loose the realistic feeling of the original recording, which defeats the purpose of having recorded that way in the first place.

In the next installment Unne will discuss MSS – Multi Stereo Surround.

Rick Rubin

Here’s a tip that I believe came from Rick Rubin.

We all know to push the elements in the chorus, right? It’s kind of a no-brainer. When mixing we usually bump the lead vocal, or whatever instrument is the main melody of the chorus, to separate it from the rest of the track and establish the hook. This is mixing 101. Well Mr. Rubin has gone one better…

The chorus is the money part of a song. Without a good hook in the chorus the listener won’t be inclined to stick around so now your “hit” song will would be just another song that they skip. Well Rick has a little trick up his sleeve that helps push the chorus even further…. He bumps the master fader!

Yep, he performs the ultimate no-no while mixing – touching the master fader.  I was taught that the master fader is the last bastian of output from the console to the mix down medium. It needs to be set at zero and not touched – at all! As it happens, Rick Rubin doesn’t pay attention to the rules of recording and has this little trick p his sleeve.

“TIP: When the chorus starts push the level on the master fader up from +1.5 db to about +2.0 db and then brings it back down the for the next part.”

Genius! Not theory of relativity genius, but still a very wise move. Why is it that the simplest of changes to the norm produce such magnificent results? I ask because I tried this recently on a song I was mixing and it made a HUGE difference. The key is to leave enough headroom so that you feel the energy in the song, but don’t hear more distortion in the mix.

If you do this with your mix already being slammed up to 0.0db your mastering engineer will not be happy with you at all. He may even consider you a hack. And no mix engineer wants that  now, do they?

Unne Lilijeblad - Mix Engineer

Recording and Mixing in Stereo
There are many different ways of creating a stereo mix. For example, when mixing multiple mono sources, such as recordings of an electric guitar, an electric bass, a saxophone and a vocalist, done with one microphone each, they can be panned across the stereo image through the use of the pan knobs found on all mixing consoles and in all DAW:s. The pan knob divides the signal between the two speakers. Turn the knob to the left and it will send more of the signal to the left speaker and less to the right, resulting in our ears interpreting the sound as if it originated somewhere to the left of center.

Another way to achieve a similar result is through the use of delay. With a real acoustic sound, such as someone clapping their hands in front of you, but a little to the left, the sound waves reach your left ear slightly before they reach your right since the distance from the source to the right ear is greater than the distance to the left. To achieve a similar effect while mixing in stereo, you can delay the signal being sent to the right speaker slightly, and the result will be that the listener “hears” the sound coming more from the left. There are limits to how much delay can be used though, because at a certain point, we start distinguishing the two signals as separate signals instead. This technique also always causes phase issues to some degree

True stereo recordings, done with multiple microphones, take advantage of one or both of these effects during the recording. One example is placing a pair of microphones in front of an orchestra in a so called “ORTF” -configuration – French radio people at the “Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise” came up with this approach in the 1960’s, trying to mimic how human ears work. Two cardioid microphones are spaced apart about 7 inches, (approximating the distance between human ears) and aimed away from each other at a 110 degree angle, allowing engineers to take advantage of both arrival time differences and the volume differences between the microphones’ on and off axis response.

Another example, that only takes advantage of volume differences, is the X/Y stereo configuration, involving two microphones placed extremely close together (eliminating arrival time differences) but aimed away from each other at a 90 degree angle. This approach gives a fairly realistic stereo image while still maintaining good mono compatibility. (Summing a stereo image that includes arrival time differences, whether recorded that way or created with delay during mixing, can often lead to undesirable effects such as comb filtering and loss of sound at certain frequencies.) Additional stereo recording techniques include M/S and Blumlein.

Over all, I would say that stereo recording techniques definitely provide more realistic sounding results than stereo images created during mixing with the above mentioned techniques. However, what works best in any given situation is of course completely at the discretion of the engineer and will depend on his or her artistic goals.

In the next installment Unne will discuss Mixing in Surround.

Unne Lilijeblad - Mix Engineer

Disappointment
Before I purchased my own surround system, I’d hardly ever heard surround sound outside of movie theaters, so when I finally got my system all setup, I had a blast watching, and especially listening to, all three Lord Of The Ring DVD’s and many other big blockbuster action movies. Well mixed surround sound really is an amazing enhancement of the movie watching experience, and that elevated my already high expectations for surround music even further.

But after purchasing my first couple of DVD-Audio discs and dealing with the hours and hours of headache it took to figure out how to even play them back on my Mac, (To this day I can only playback Dolby Digital and DTS streams through VLC and have to resort to obscure command-line DVD-A utilities running in Windows under VMWare Fusion to rip the CPPM protected Meridian Lossless Streams to hard disk) I was kind of disappointed about the whole experience. To put it simply, it basically seemed to me that most mixes could be put into one of two groups. Either they were very conservative or they were way too gimmicky.

The conservative mixes were basically just enhancements of the stereo experience with mostly ambience and just a little bit of everything else added in the rear channels, some vocals and a few  other elements added to the center channel, and that was about it. I could achieve similar results by simply sending a plain old stereo mix to both the front and rear channels. It “surrounds” you, but it doesn’t really bring you into the music. I had been expecting much more depth, clarity, and more of a feeling of envelopment.

The gimmicky mixes felt like the engineers had simply spread all the elements out between the different speakers. There’d be a guitar in the rear right speaker, a synth sound in the rear left, vocals exclusively in the center channel, tons of bass and kick in the sub channel and so on. Then you’d have pan moves where the guitar solo would move from the front to the back or spin around you. Kind of cool, and it worked decently for some styles of music, but I wouldn’t call it tasteful.

It felt like there was a big potential for beautiful, clear and enveloping sound that just wasn’t being realized. And so I set out to try and create better sounding surround mixes.

In the next installment Unne will discuss Recording and Mixing in Stereo and how it differs from Surround.

As you can clearly see most production work is being done in-the-box.

68% of production in happening in-the-box.

As I mentioned the information being shared on LinkedIn is really good. So good that I found this gem of a technique from Producer/Engineer/Mixer, Robert L. Smith.

Multiple de-essers set minimally at specific frequencies, as opposed to one de-esser really digging in. Found this to be the best method. Sometimes this could be up to 5 different de-essers. Some of those new ‘bright’ microphones can be kind of harsh… Robert L. Smith.

I’ve never heard nor seen this done before but it makes perfect sense and I’m very excited to try out. If this sounds like something you’d like to contribute to please join us over in the Small Recording Studio Network on LinkedIn or leave a comment below.