Author: Daniel Quick

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Help to Shape the Future of Studio.Stage.Live!

Hey everyone, I hate to say it but the effects of Covid-19 have finally reached my blog. Because my job usually involves lots of live mixing, meeting new people, and vastly different weeks I can easily generate lots of filler to come alongside my normal postings. Posts like “Meet an Engineer,” “Editorial,” and “From the Booth” just naturally make themselves but in this season two things have happened. First, the virus has thrust me into post production, which has been great but it means that each week for me usually looks about the same and wouldn’t be a fun watch or read. Secondly, the lock-down has all but eliminated my usual opportunities to go to conferences, interact with other professionals in my field, and have time to the kinds of innovation that I prefer to do every now and again.

So I need your help.

I created a survey that’s just three questions that each highlight a way you can help if you’d like to. The first question just lets me know where you as the reader are at and what you’d like to see. The second question is just an open call to tell me exactly what I should be writing about. I know all of you are likely more gifted than you think you think. I’ve been able to learn both from guys who have been doing audio for decades and from people who just started and asked just the right question. If you want to write and share your experiences, let me know, we’ll figure something out. I want this site to turn into a group of engineers whose goal is to help us as a group, get better. If you want to be a part of that, leave me your contact info and I’ll get back to you ASAP!

One last the thing, if you like what you’ve been reading, the best thing you can do is subscribe. My goal personally is to write new content each week but sometimes I just don’t come up with something worthy of your time. If you subscribe you’ll get an email shortly after any post has gone live so you won’t miss anything that happens here and you won’t have to keep checking to see if you new content is available. You can go to this link, fill out the form, and that’s it! If you have any questions just email me at daniel@studiostagelive.com or leave a comment below or on Facebook! Thanks for your help with the survey and being a part of the community here, see you next week!

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School of Mixing – Tom Lord Alge

Every now and again I catch a webinar or video that catches my eye. Last time it was a discussion in a bar that I found interesting (click here to read that post) but this time, it’s just a straight up mixing discussion that waves put on with Tom Lord Alge (or TLA as he will be called from here on out. Please take the time, if you have the time, to watch the video but what would my blog be without my thoughts and opinions. So below the video I’ve listed my key takeaways and things that stuck out to me. Enjoy!

1. “It’s not about the Gear, it’s about the Ear!” While I can say for certainty that gear sometimes is the issue, they are completely right about this. Good mixing is more about the engineer than the hardware. 

2. A cool way to check any midi generated trigger tracks (i.e. drum replacements) is with a ducker that pulls audio from original (acting as a mute rather than opening up), than it’s really easy to know if you missed it because you hear the drum instead of it being muted by the trigger. 

3. “Don’t be afraid to experiment….what can happen?” THis is something I find myself doing a lot. Sometimes you just hit a wall trying to fix a problem so I usually step away and come back and try to approach it from a completely different angle. Remember, if you save as often as you should be, experimenting is for the most part risk free!

4. If you’re going to take your mix to the next level…you’re going to have to spend some time chopping and editing your files. This is a given really. Good stuff just takes time. It takes lots of passes. Tweaking plugs can only go so far, editing the source files is necessary a lot of the time. 

5. Don’t be afraid to duplicate tracks to create width and stereo effect for your files. This is something I’ll be trying in an upcoming session for sure. I’ve personally never thought of this but just like we said earlier, don’t be afraid to experiment!

6. Especially in the studio, don’t be afraid of additive EQ, this isn’t live. A lot of mixers will do subtractive EQ before compression and additive EQ after dynamics but really anything is game if it makes it better. 

7. He talked about finding a workflow that allows you to work both creatively and effectively, your plugin choice should promote that. This should speak to how, in audio production, there is usually multiple paths to a finished product. They may end in slightly different places but both work. Find the way that works for you and stick to it! Be confident in your choices. The beauty of plugins is that everyone can use them differently, if you are peer reviewing, if your customers like your mixes, you can skin that bird any way you like

8. Work until you feel like you need a break. Then come back when you’re ready. Don’t rush the process or ignore what your ears are telling you. If you don’t have a deadline looming over you there is no need to push your ears too hard. 

9. With time and creativity, you can fix bad recordings, don’t give up. This really inspired me to not be so caught up with acting defeated because of something in my source. Our job as engineers is to actually “engineer” (or develop) a solution. 

10. “Trust your gut.” Live and die by your mix decisions (in doing that you create your signature sound). Mix everyday, hang around musicians, learn the craft. Put in the time and the skills will come naturally. Basically he is saying to just keep grinding. Don’t give up. 

Let me know if you guys like these kinds of posts in the comments below. I love watching this kind of stuff and being inspired a bit. Do you guys like them? 

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Tips and Tricks: Mixing in Post – Part 3

It is week 3 here for our “Mixing in Post” tips and tricks series and this week I wanted to do something a bit different. I am going to go through a few of the mistakes I made through this process. Some of them may not be “wrong” per say but doing it differently had positive results for me as I was working on each week’s mix. If you had a different experience than I did with one of these examples, let me know in the comments!

The first problem I learned to fix very quickly. Ensuring that all your recorded tracks are in time with each other should be a heavy priority in your workflow. For me, it’s not as if I didn’t think about this but early on I didn’t utilize the SMPTE features of my DAW. As you know by now I extract the speaking portions of any worship focus or in song transitions to a different speech track for that vocalist to bring greater clarity to those moments. Having the files locked to a SMPTE time really helps prevent any unwanted movements in the timeline thus helping to keep everything in perfect time so everything just locks together. Another hiccup to this for those of you heavy Waves users like me is that the StudioRack plugin defaults to “SG” mode when it is instantiated. If you’re able to run all your tracks on your server this isn’t really a problem. However we only have a Server One and run about ~70 tracks in our DAW so we run all input level tracks locally and all effects and summing busses on the server which allows us to maximize the use of both our external server and the iMac Pro we are mixing on. Where this gets complicated is with the auto delay compensation in Logic. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t work too well at times if things aren’t setup correctly (if you send an input to the server instead of keeping it local). Additionally there are some plugins that we can use that use large amounts of lookahead which make them heavily latent. All of this to say that the tip here is to pay attention to your internal latency within your DAW. Be sure to be listening carefully as you mix as well for issues. Sometimes timing issues are hard to spot if you’ve been working awhile on a mix but sending drafts out to friends will help you catch these issues as well. Secondly, treat your mix layers as closely as possible. Process all your input level plugins on the same machine, process summing busses similarly, do everything you can with similar plugins if possible. The idea here is to keep it simple. The more complex your setup, the more compensation will be needed, the easier it is for you to have an issue that will be hard to dig out of. This isn’t to say you can’t go nuts if you need, what I like to say is do what you need and clean up the rest. Try any plugin you need but make sure you clean up your experiments when you’re done so they don’t end up negatively affecting your mix.

This one I’ve said before but it bears another round. Be sure to check mic positions before you start recording. Drum kits are big ones to check. They sit down and adjust everything and move a mic without thinking about it so I love to stop by after they’ve been playing for a bit during the warm up and make sure it’s all where I like it to be. Secondly, think about issues you’ve had in the past with bleed and see if there is anything you can do to help. For instance, I used to have the overheads perfectly centered and on axis with the drum set. But I kept getting way too much hi-hat in the mic. So one week I decided to experiment rotation the mic so that the hi-hat would be off axis with the mic and it made a big difference. Another great example of that is with a cello player. We were already experimenting with the best mic but never thought about micing the cello at an angle not only to put the drums in the null but also the piano. We use a keyboard so it’s not piano bleed that was an issue. Believe it or not, we could hear the pedal fairly clearly. Just about an inch of change made a huge difference. Little improvements in the source material make a big difference in the end product. Especially when it comes to audio whether it’s live or recorded. 

This last scenario is sort of just situational but it’s impact can be felt either way. Early on in the transition from live to broadcast mixing I had a 24 hour turnaround. This necessitated a few shortcuts to be implemented to help speed up the process. So I developed my mastering chain and dropped it on my master buss. I was able to save quite a bit of time and mix through mastering but there were a lot of things I’d likely change about those mixes if I was redoing them today. The biggest reason for not mixing and mastering at the same time is that limiters can work against you if you’re not paying attention to them (the same goes for buss compressors). While my mixes turned out pretty good, I was not good at monitoring what that chain was doing at any given time which lead to more work fixing it. If you need to turnaround a project really quickly, find a way to really keep an eye on your master buss as much as possible. But, if you’ve got the time for an extra mastering pass, as I definitely do now, take the time to separate those processes. Maybe even export your mix and start a new showfile if you can do that within your workflow (this doesn’t fit within our workflow but might in yours and it’s what a lot of pros do on the regular).

No matter how you do things, I wanted to end this series with a bit about not overthinking your mix. We had to realize early on that this is a broadcast mix not an album. This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be as good as we need it to but it is a broadcast mix. It should feel like a live recording not an album. That feel leads to higher interaction with the music and it’s what we wanted in our mixes. Know your customer, know what they want, and be sure to work accordingly. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this series and learned something helpful to your situation. As always if you have any questions reach out in the comments below, on facebook, or email me at daniel@studiostagelive.com. If you’ve liked what you read and want to know when a new post is up, follow this link, fill out the form, and you’ll be emailed when a new post is up. Happy mixing!