Watch out for the More ME syndrome

Transcription

1 Objective: By the end of this lab you will be able apply plug-ins to tracks. Adjust those plug-ins to enhance the mix. Set up Groups and Sub-Mixes with effects sends. Convert dual mono tracks into a single stereo track. How to color code tracks. Open the AE1_Lab8_Mixing project. You can use any project you like, but this lab will refer specifically to that session. If for some reason you can t locate that session, open the Patrick session. There is another version of the session that has all the steps of this lab applied to it. You may want to open that session after you are done with this lab to see how you compare. In previous labs you have been shown how to display Inserts, Sends and I/O. Make sure that at least Inserts A-E, Sends A-E and I/O are being displayed. Mixing What is going on? It is important to make distinctions between the main goals of the various audio engineers involved in the music making process. The Tracking (Recording) Engineer has a main job to document the performance with the hottest, cleanest signals possible; ALWAYS sacrificing hot (loud) for clean (no noise). The average levels are going to be around -12dB to -20dB to allow for headroom for peaks and the like. Tracking Engineers sure the sound the performers make is the sound that gets recorded. Sometimes the Tracking Engineer has to be sure the sound being created is the sound the band really wants. Being a good tracking engineer will get you more gigs as word of your abilities start to spread around. You never know where your Pro Tools session will end up. The Mixing Engineer is going to take those individual tracks from the Tracking Engineer, tweak the harmonic content through equalization, tweak the loudnesses (gain), blending those tracks into a song. Sweetening with reverb or various other effects. Sure, it is more complicated than that, but for AE1, this is good for now. The Mastering engineer is going to take the songs from the Mixing Engineer and create a cohesive album by making the song order flow with appropriate spacing, fading, overall loudness from song to song, overall EQ and Reverb to sound as though they all belong together and finally the over all Compression/Limiting to get the maximum levels desired without distortion. Sometimes all three jobs Tracking, Mixing & Mastering are done by one person. An advantage of this is the intimate familiarity with the project, the songs and the people involved. This can also be a disadvantage if the person is too close to the project in that their creativity has gone stale or they are stuck in a rut. There is a separate document Mixing Tips and Tricks.pdf that lists out for you how to keep as fresh as possible when mixing. Budget is also a contributing factor when parsing these jobs. Sometimes you can t afford three different people where you can afford one person as a package deal. This lab deals with Mixing, the blending together of tracks to make a song. There are basically two kinds of mixers Additive and Subtractive. The additive mixer keeps adding and adding gain to the tracks. Unfortunately, there is only so far you can go and peaking is not too far away. The subtractive mixers start with all faders at Unity Gain and take away that which it too loud. This is okay, too, but chances are your master fader is going to peak out and distortion happens immediately, so you have to get to a certain level before distortion stops, then the real mixing starts. I do a combination of the two. At the start of the mixing process I ll bring all faders, except the Master Fader, down to about -12dB. Then bring up the lead instrument until the meters average -12dB to -15dB. Then bring up the next most important instrument. How do you decide what is the next most important instrument? Ask yourself, if this were an acoustic performance what would accompany the lead? Bring up the level of that instrument so that it blends and supports the lead. Keep doing this until you are out of tracks. FYI: We learn the rules so we know how to break them with purpose. A friend of mine who has a Grammy for engineering an Pantera album told me Mixing is an art form. There are no rules there are only guidelines. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 1

2 How to start your mix. Some people start at the left and work their way right, e.g. Kick, Snare, Hi Hat where others start with their favorite instrument and go out from there. The only rule in mixing is that there are no rules, just guidelines. Not that there is any right way to mix, I just tend to want to get to the creative process as quickly as possible. Every song is different. Every artist is different. So every song could be approached differently. Sometimes you have to mix differently just to keep from going nuts. If you were the tracking engineer you already know these first few steps, but if this is the first time you are hearing these songs you have to become familiar with the songs. Before I do any mixing of any kind I make sure there are no anomalies in the tracks. Listen to the entire song to see of you hear any problems that need to be addressed, e.g. bad punch points, glitches, clicks, ticks, pops. Do count offs need trimming out? Is there talking to be removed? Mistakes need editing out? Do you need to edit the parts to make the timing of the instruments tighter? If you have multi-mono tracks, should you move them to a stereo track? Get rid of all the technical editing before you start the creative process. What about the sound quality of the instruments? Does THAT instrument sound as good as THAT instrument can? What don t you like? What tool would you use to make that change happen EQ, Compressor, Both? You can t mix a bad instrument in at the beginning with the hopes of fixing it later. Get all the instruments sounding just the way you want them to sound early on brighter, darker, remove room tone, remove frequencies that are not natural to that particular instrument. Enhance frequencies to give the instrument a special feel. There are times where you don t have to do anything at all other than to turn it up or down. Then there are other times you could spend all day tweaking one instrument to get it sounding just so. Once you have all the instruments sounding the way you like you can then start the mixing process. By doing these repairs you have become intimately familiar with the individual parts, which will make this next step go very quickly. Once you have set the lead instrument to about -12dB to -15dB and brought up the next most important instruments after that and so on. Try just bringing up the overheads of the drum kit first. These mics have the entire kit in the mix emphasizing the overhead cymbals. There will be some kick, some snare, some high hat and Toms. Bring up the overheads until the cymbals are at a good level for you. Now all you have to do is bring up the portions of the drum kit that you want more of by using portions of the individual channels. Ease them in until they support the song the way you like it. This is MUCH faster than starting with the kick then snare When to Pan what where. Panning is the left to right placement (in stereo) of the instruments. In surround sound you can have 6 to 8 channels of discrete placement and it gets complicated quickly. If you leave everything panned in the center then you just have a mono mix, which was given up in the 1950s. How do you decide what to pan where? All I can do is give you some guidelines: Lead instrument is in the center, mostly dry signal, maybe its LR bus can have some verb on it. Dry signals are perceived as the source of the signal. Kick & Bass panned Center. Low frequencies are non directional and using both speakers for these instruments will give your mix more power in the low end as opposed to just one speaker. Separate instruments of the same frequency range to opposite sides of the pan to avoid frequency overload on one side. Not necessarily HARD left and HARD Right, just get them out of each others way. Avoid panning to wide. Stay under 50 if you can. The big exception is the overheads. Pan those 100% Left and 100% Right. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 2

3 Reverb (wet) goes in the opposite channel of it s source (dry). Imagine you in the expensive seats, looking at the band. Where do you imagine everyone to be on stage? What do you hear behind you, beside you, in front of you? Then make a diagram using circles, their position on stage. This drawing pretty much determines your panning for you. Do it in pencil as what you thought might work may not and you will have to change. It happens. Load the AE1_Lab8_Mixing project. Display Inserts A-E, Sends A-E, I/O. Locate to 2: or press. 1. (Period, KP 1, Period) to locate to the start of the song. Go to the mixer window (CMD =) and adjust all the faders to -12dB or so. If the session opened with groups turned on this is very easy in that when you move one fader they all move. Disable Groups (CMD SHIFT G) and OPT + Click on the Master Fader to put the Master Fader back to Unity Gain. Press play, listening to the entire song; there SHOULD be no peaks. Determine the lead instrument, the instrument that plays or sings the melody. You would be hard pressed to convince someone that the lead instrument is NOT the Sax. This sax was double mic d in that one U87 microphone was placed at the bell of the sax and the other was place near the keys to get all the clicks and air leaks in case we needed to make this a more intimate mix. Solo each one to hear the difference one is brighter (more high mids and highs) while the other is darker (more low mids and lows). You have to determine what you like best, just Channel 15, just Channel 14, both in some combination way? It is your call. Should one be featured over the other or should one be obliterated? Once you have decided make sure the panning of the Sax is dead center. OPT + Click on the panning knobs to put them back to dead center. As a rule, the lead instrument ALWAYS goes in the center. Sure there are exceptions, but until you get the basics down, just follow these rules. Now that you have the lead instrument set, determine the next most important instrument? What would accompany or play the harmony to the lead? The piano and Synth are both harmony parts, which plays at the same time as the sax more often? The piano and synth are both dual mono tracks. There are advantages and disadvantages to this process. For this level, lets make them into a stereo track, one for each instrument. Click on the track name Piano R to make the name highlight. Add a new stereo audio track (CMD SHIFT N, use the CMD + Arrow keys to make those changes) When you hit OK a new stereo audio track will appear under the Piano R track. Press the F8 key until you get the Object Grabber. In the gray area before audio, on the Piano L track, click and drag to select all audio on that track and drag down to the Piano R track. You should have highlighted all regions on the Piano L & Piano R tracks. Once the audio regions on those tracks are selected (highlighted) press and hold the CTRL key, then click and drag those two tracks of audio down to the new track you just created. You will notice that you cannot drag them left or right. If the regions jumped somewhere then you pressed CTRL first and clicked on the region. Hit UNDO (CMD + Z) and retry. The regions MUST be highlighted first, THEN CTRL click and drag down. The new track s color is Blue. To change it to match the original Piano track click on Piano L then press and hold the SHIFT key while you click on the Audio 1 (new audio) track. This will highlight all three track names. Double click on the color tab to the left of the track name. Don t click on the triangles, but click on the Color Tab in between the triangles. A color pallet pops up with two boxes highlighted. Just click on the yellow box and it changes all highlighted tracks to that color. Double click on the Audio 1 Track and rename it Piano Stereo. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 3

4 Repeat these steps for the Synth track and rename the new track Synth Stereo. When done, right click on the track names of the empty tracks and pull down to Hide and make Inactive. The track will disappear from the edit window, but will remain in the Track list to the left, it will be grayed out, ghosted. Solo the Sax & Synth. Blend in the level of the Synth to support, just under the Sax so that when only those two play you have nice sounding product. There are times when the attack of the synth notes is so strong that it hinders the Sax part, meaning during the short stabs of sections the keyboard overpowers the Sax. Put a compressor on the Synth track on Insert B. Use the Compressor/Limiter Dyn3. Compressors are covered in a previous lab. Load a presets, tweak the knobs, play with the knobs all you want, but we just want to lessen the impact of those short stabs. Set the Knee to 8dB, Attack 10us, Gain 3dB, Ratio 6.0:1, Release 500ms, Threshold -10dB. If you come up with better settings, GREAT, use them. Let your ears be the judge. Now that you have set the level for the Sax & Synth, add the Piano. How do you like the tonal characteristics of the piano? Too bright, too dull? Too many highs, too many lows? Put an EQ on Insert A of the Piano track and mess around with changing the timbre (tonal characteristics) of the piano. Can you modify it to fit your tastes? Get set in your mind what you want to get then decide what tool is going to help you achieve that goal. Do you want certain frequencies accentuated, others taken away? It is your call, USE YOUR EARS. If you don t know what sounds good, then learn what sounds bad, mess up the piano, and then don t do that. For me, I put a high pass filter (HPF), 24dB/octave at around 200Hz and a HMF (green) with the Q=1.7, Freq = 6.xkHz ish, Gain = 8.0dB because I wanted to get rid of the rumble and help the clarity of the upper end of the notes being played. I also put a compressor to contain the chorus sections where the piano is more active. Knee = 20dB, Attack at 1 ms, Gain at 3.x db, Ratio 3.x:1, Release 500ms, Threshold at -12dB or so. Just enough to effect the chorus but not the other parts. Add the Bass Guitar. It is a very plucky part, not a lot of tonal materials to be had, except at the chorus. To contain the pluckyness, put a compressor on Insert B. Load the Bass Guitar preset. Adjust the Threshold to be -12dB, Ratio 4:1, Gain 3.x db. This will help get rid of some of the edge on the slap. Since this is a rather melodic part you don t want to let it get confused with the kick so put an EQ after the compressor this time. Put an HPF 24dB/Octave at 80Hzish. Sweeten the string plucks at HMF, Q=.77, Freq = 2k ish, Gain 6.x db. All this time, you have been setting your levels based on the ability to hear the Sax lead. You should be able to differentiate between all the parts and hear them individually. It is time to add the drums. What most people do is start with the kick, snare, High hat and so on through the kit. I m going to show you a very fast way to get a drum kit under control. Pan the overheads to the extreme where OH L is hard left and OH R is hard right. You could make the OH L & OH R a stereo track like we did to the synth and Piano if you want, but lets do this differently. Click on the OH L track name, it should highlight. Shift click on the OH R track. With those two tracks highlighted make them a group, CMD G. and call it Overheads. As long as groups are activated when you grab one of these two faders they both will move in unison. If for some reason ALL faders move you will have to disable the ALL group. Show Groups and click on! ALL to disable just that group as pictured here. Set the faders of the overhead to a comfortable level for what is in that track. There is going to be a drum or two that is not loud enough. This is when you go to that individual track and ease in that particular drum to taste to have the entire kit support the entire mix. You can go to each of the drums you turn up, listen to their timbre and add EQ to enhance their natural characteristics. This is when you need that frequency chart given to you way earlier. If you want more body, Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 4

5 less boxyness, more slap that chart will tell you what EQ settings typically are used to make those adjustments. For example to sweeten the kick In this mix the kick is rather bland. You may want to increase 60Hz to give it more body. There is a strong harmonic at 102hz that could be lessened or enhanced, your call. To get more slap, try goosing 3.25kHz 6dB. Use your ears, not your eyes when mixing. See if these frequencies work for YOU, maybe they stink and your taste says otherwise. GREAT! Your ears are the most powerful tool you have going for you. Turn up what you can t hear, turn down what bothers you. Keep adding parts of the kit you want to accentuate until that blend supports the entire song. Do you need all the other parts of the drum kit? Just one or two? None? What do your ears tell you? Panning: We spoke about panning earlier in this lab. I ll give you some settings you may want to use for this song. Sax = Dead Center. Synth R = 100% right, L = 20% Right, Piano L=100% left, R=20% left. This way, the two instruments that have near the same frequency range are separated by channels and we gain clarity out of each side as opposed to overloading left and right with the exact same frequencies. Kick & Bass Dead Center to take advantage of the increased headroom when using more than one channel to produce the same sound. Since the Bass & Kick are low frequencies and low frequencies are non-directional you can get away with putting them in the center. All the other stuff, pretty much covered by the overheads, just blend to taste. A word on the panning controls. We have spoken and demonstrated in class, but I want to be sure you can experiment on your own in a lab. When you call up the mixer you are faced with the default faders as in the right side of this picture, but there is more to see. To get a floating fader you have to click on the little icon to the right of the output and it will bring up a single fader window like the one in the left side of this picture. In the panning window there is the name of the track first, in this case SynthStereo. You can click here to select a different track as needed. The fader you are looking at, in this case Main Out, but it could be Send a j. Click on it and you will see. Next is the output of this channel, in this case 1-2. The next three buttons are interesting. SAFE means Never Make Automation Changes, it is SAFE from changes. When SAFE is activated the button will turn green as pictured here and no matter what mode your automation is in, no new automation data will be written to this track as long as SAFE is on. We will talk about automation in the next lab, but I have seen wonderful mixes get completely trashed because someone didn t protect their work or save their work as often as they should. Link is the middle button. This means that whatever I do to one knob pan knob, do the exact same thing to the other pan knob when Link is active it will turn orange, as pictured here. The last icon is the mirror icon. This means whatever I do to one pan knob do the opposite to the other pan knob. It is very common to use the Link and Mirror at the same time so that whatever I do to one, the exact opposite is done to the other. This next section tells you your current automation status. The next lab will cover in great detail the various automation modes. Currently this track is set to Read automation, which means to DO or PERFORM the automation that is already in place. The rest of the fader is pretty much the same as it is in the mixer. Panning followed by panning values, Solo, Mute, Gain & Meters. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 5

6 Panning values go from -100 (Full Left) to 100 (Full Right) A good exercise is to think of panning in a different way. Not so much how much is in a particular channel as much as how much is NOT in the other channel. For example: -100 can mean 100% of the audio is in the left channel and 0% of the audio is in the right channel. A setting of -90 means 5% in the right channel. Why not 10% in the right? The difference between the extremes is a value of 200. Take a calculator and add +200 to -100 (hard left) and you will end up with 100 (hard right). So, every 10 increments = 5% change. Solo a channel, the bass for instance. Pan it hard left. Remove your left headphone, using only the right headphone. Watch your master fader meters and slowly pan the bass to the right, -95, -90, -85 and so on. See how LITTLE it takes to make it s presence known in that channel? When you get to zero, that really means 50% of the audio is in each channel, placing it in the center. Actually called a Phantom Center. Play with the panning to give the illusion of the performers being on the stage. Refer back to your diagram of where you imagine they would be and put the panning knobs in that direction. Almost done: Once you set your levels for all the instruments and it sounds wonderful to you, take a look at your master fader meters. First of all, you should not have any red lights in any tracks, plug-ins or busses. If you do, you have a problem. Clear peaks (Opt + C) and play the song from the start again. Stop when you see a red light and adjust your mix so there are no red lights. Red lights in meters for a final product is a sign of an inept mixer. If for some reason you think your mix audio level is too low and you want to maximize the audio level coming out of the master fader you will have to place a compressor / Limiter on the master fader. The compressor squashes the dynamic range so the louds and quiets are closer together. The limiter says don t get louder than THIS. There are many ways to maximize the gain of a song. The following are the easiest to follow. Not necessarily the ideal method, just another method. It is all situational, so we can t cover EVERY scenario in one lab. Make a group of all tracks EXCEPT for the Master Fader. Locate to the loudest portion of the song. Select that area and loop play it. Grab a fader, any one will work as the tracks are grouped, and push that fader until the meters in the Master Fader hit one red light every now and again. Do not push until the red lights stay on all the time. Just touch the red light now-and-again, lightly. This is lousy audio due to all the clipping going on. Master Fader inserts are Post Fader meaning the effect is applied AFTER the fader. This allows for dithering to be applied after the Master Fader level has been set. To be absolutely sure there is no clipping insert a stereo AUX just before the Master Fader. Assign it s input to be the next available Bus, in this session that would be Bus 1-2. Label this new AUX track Sub Mix by double clicking on the AUX 1 name. Select all tracks, except for the SUB MIX Aux track and the Master Fader. Shift + Opt click on the output of any track and select Bus 1-2. Set the input of the AUX channel to be Bus 1-2. Solo safe that new AUX channel (CMD click on the SOLO button remember ALL AUX TRACKS MUST BE SOLO SAFE D) On that AUX channel insert the Compressor/Limiter Dyn 3. Load the Clean Limit settings. Now bypass the insert. Go to the start of the song period KP1 period on the keypad and hit play. There is a Sax lead in line then the entire band hits a chord. That chord will peak, and therefore will clip, which results in lousy audio. Turn off the bypass on the Compressor/Limiter Dyn3 and hit play again. You will see that that strong chord has been tamed by several db and is within limits for mastering the song. What about reverb? In previous labs we showed you how to put reverb in line, as an insert onto a track, but you have more flexibility if you use an AUX track. After the Sub Mix track, add another Stereo AUX whose input is BUS 3-4 and label that AUX Verb then Solo Safe it, too. (CMD Click on the SOLO button to ghost it). Set this new AUX output to be Output 1-2. There should be no peaks in the output as reverb is a garnish, a sweetener to the main audio. You won t turn it up that loudly. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 6

7 On the Sub Mix track, insert a SEND whose output is 3-4 and set the Send fader to Unity Gain. Just OPT + Click on the fader and it will snap to Unity Gain. Since Sends default to Post Fader mode, meaning that the level going out the send is determined by the fader on that channel, setting the send fader to Unity Gain lets you know exactly how much audio is leaving that channel. As a rule, I reserve Insert A for EQ and Insert B for Compressors, Insert C is for EQs that need to happen AFTER compression so the earliest I would put a reverb would be on Insert D. Sure, you can put any insert in any slot, just remember, Pro Tools processes the audio starting at insert A and goes through to insert J. I just like to be consistent for organizational purposes. This way, when I look at the mixer window and the faders have been set to narrow faders (CMD + OPT + M) I can tell at a glance where all the EQs, Compressors and other stuff without thinking. It is obvious when you follow a system. Load the reverb of choice, in this case D-Verb (sure there are others that are WAY better, but this is the one that came free with Pro Tools). Load Medium Room and see how you like it. Do you? What would you change? Mess around with the other presets, see what they do. How would you change them? Do you want more ring out, less ring out, more high frequencies, fewer higher frequencies? What is your instinct telling you? What are your ears telling you. You can use the fader of the Verb Aux to dial in how much or how little Verb you want in the mix. If you don t want to send your whole mix to the verb then remove or disable (CTRL + CMD + CLICK on it) the Send on the SUB MIX Aux track and put sends only on the tracks you want verb to appear. The amount of audio getting to the verb is controlled by the send fader. For example, the Synth patch already has a ton of verb in it. Maybe you just want one of the Sax parts, Piano and Overheads to go into the verb. To create sends across multiple channels in one step CMD + Click on all the tracks names you want to have sends. Press and hold Shift + OPT as you click on a send on one of those tracks. When you select the send output that same setting will be added to all the tracks that were selected (highlighted). Place sends on those channels and see what happens. Maybe add the Bass. Experiment, play around, you are not going to hurt anything. Let your ears lead you. There are times when other instruments take the lead and the Sax takes a back seat. These instruments can t be heard as the featured instrument. In the old days we had to sit there and ride the faders as we printed (bounced) the mix. Now-a-days we have automation. Any parameter, knob and fader (just about) can be automated and these moves can be rehearsed, edited, copied, pasted and best of all, remembered for future mixes. Stay tuned for automation in the next lab. Just some rules of thumb: Louder is perceived closer to you, quieter is perceived as further away. The closer something is, the less reverb there should be. Further away = more room/ambient/reverb. Or said another way: Close = Dry, Further away = wetter. Put the wet signal opposite of the dry signal. If the lead is in the center, it s wet signal should be panned hard left & right. If the dry instrument if mostly left, put it s wet signal mostly right. Draw out the stage or venue on a piece of paper. Draw circles where you think the instruments should be located. Move them closer or further back, left or right. Once you get this diagram in your head you can do a huge amount of mechanical setup for your mix, allowing you to get to the creative process sooner. Just by having drawn out the stage, you have predetermined panning and relative gain. As always, ask questions in class regarding anything that may be confusing or unclear. Lets clear it up as there is probably someone else who is having the same problem, but it is too scared to speak out in class. Save all your work then do a Save As and call it AE1_Lab_08_YourLastName.ptx Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 7