Author: Daniel Quick

Posted on

Tips and Tricks: Gating Drum Inputs

This is week two of our current tips and tricks series where I’ll be discussing gating drums and how to set them up the best way. Last week in the series, we discussed things that I do in order to get full piano/pad sounds on a stage with a full band as well. If you missed it check it out at this link. This week we are going to touch on using gates on drums, what not to do, and the little tricks to make the best of whatever you have. For the sake of discussion, lets already assume that you have your drums tuned and that you’ve chosen the best mic from what you have to suit each drum.

So, you’ve decided that you would like to use a gate on your drums. Not at all uncommon. There are some that are afraid of gates because you might miss out on a hit that you may need or simply don’t have the know-how to turn it on and set it up right and many more that use them religiously. The benefits to gating are quite apparent, most of which include the elimination of sounds entering your mix beyond what you are looking for from that input and secondarily controlling how much sustain that sound is allowed. For those reasons, gates are generally used on percussive inputs over less instantaneous and more sustained inputs like vocals or keys. Personally, the majority of my gating shows up on the drum sets with some very minor use on guitars to automatically rid me of that pesky tube noise coming from amps or hums from pickups. But before we get into this it’s important to go over the terms. There are 5 key terms to be aware of and unfortunately, each board uses different numerical schemes for these variables so you really just have to play around until you like what you are hearing and seeing happen within your console.

Range – the amount the input is lowered by if the audio input is beneath the threshold.

Threshold – this is the input level required to open the gate

Attack – attack is how fast the attenuation is released from the input after the audio levels pass the threshold

Hold – the time after the audio goes back under the threshold but before the attenuation starts again is referred to as the “hold”

Release – this is how fast the attenuation kicks in after the audio is beneath the threshold and after the hold time has been completed.

Here is a graph that shows what these mean if that would help you to understand things better. I know it helped me a lot when I was learning (if you click on it, you can look at a bigger version.

Through most of my career mixing I’ve just gated the regular way, by using the audio from the microphone as the thing that triggers the gate to open. This works pretty well.  I have always been able to gate the bottom snare, kick in (if I have one), and the toms. This has allowed me to be able to control the non-useful ambient sounds of the drum kick that I don’t need. Sounds like snare in my kick and cymbals in the tom inputs. Usually on these gates I’d run a range of about -20db, thresholds set with some wiggle room to allow dynamic playing by the drummer, attacks that are about as fast the board with go without added any weird sounds, small amount of hold, and a release times between 150ms and 300ms. While these settings didn’t work for everything, they worked for most things. I unfortunately couldn’t really gate the snare top or the kick out mic (the one in the hole) because they lose their punchiness and attack while gated, this is because the gate couldn’t react fast enough while it’s being triggered by the acoustics of the drum. While you are still significantly better having gated bottom snare and tom mics, there is still some bleed that is especially noticeable in the drum verbs and the cymbals and hi hat still leak into mics all over the place because the other kick and snare mics are wide open. There are little things you can do to help (like using a dynamic EQ to created a frequency based gate) but you still can’t really gate the whole kit and really suck out that bleed unless you are editing in post production. However, there is one way….

That other way is by drum triggers. No no no, we aren’t talking about triggering recorded sounds to play with the drum is hit (though these can be used for that) but rather using a different type of mic that reacts faster in order to open up the drum gates. Drum triggers use a vibration pickup similar to that of some acoustic guitars that is much more sensitive than standard mics. This does of course require some extra inputs and a sound board that externally key a gate but most modern consoles have that ability to do this. For the kick drum you’ll need this trigger and for the rest of the drums, you’ll need this trigger. Just a heads up, you do actually need to get the kick drum trigger because of the difference in the rim on the kick being much deeper than in the snare and toms. After you get them installed on the drum hoops of your drums, I just plugged those into a DI and straight into the board. I’ve heard that you can make a cable instead of going through the DI but I haven’t tried that. So that is something to try if you don’t have any extra DI’s sitting around. We just used an 8-way radio DI because we had one sitting around because the 8th channel was broken. From there we patched each trigger to a channel so we could do whatever we needed to with the sound before we used it than set the external keys on basically the whole drum set excluding cymbals, ride, and hi-hat. I was really skeptical at first that we still wouldn’t be much better off but surprisingly, it was amazing! Because the triggers pick up vibrations not sound waves, they picked up the softer sounds much more effectively. We gated both kick mics to the kick trigger, both snare mics to the snare trigger, and each tom to itself. The very first week, without being prompted one of our more professional drummers came up asked what we did because the drums sounded so much tighter and clean. This also really cleaned up the verbs which had a profound effect on the slop in the drum sounds. Even on the ballads, I just make a quick adjustment to the thresholds to make sure they open for all the ghost notes. Just like that, I can gate just about everything all time. Personally I don’t gate any brass (cymbals, hi hat, ride) because I still want some drum set sounds so they don’t sound like samples and with setup, I still get plenty. Settings on the triggers are about the same just with a lower threshold because everything but the threshold can really shape the actual sound which we still want to happen. The only thing I use the triggers for is to speed up the gate opening, and for that they have been flawless so far. The biggest thing is that even on the softer songs I don’t have to adjust the gate near as much because of the sensitivity of these triggers and we can still get all those ghost notes without having to automate the gates on and off.

Now, I know that not everyone can afford to buy the triggers for their whole kit right away or have enough extra inputs to plug them all in, so if that’s the case, I’d focus on getting one or two triggers and putting them on your snare and the tom closest to your snare. These usually are the two that produce the most bleed so if you have to limit yourself, just try to get one or maybe two and get started with that. I promise you’ll be happy. As always, don’t just take my settings and run, be sure to test things in your room. What works for me may not work for you, so no matter what, put the trigger in, bring up some playback if you have some, and just start using your ears.

Next we will be looking at setting up guitars to be wireless the right way so that pedal boards and amps can all get the right signals. As always please feel free to tell your friends about the blog and subscribe at this link if you haven’t already! See you next time!

Posted on

Tips and Tricks: The Keys to Great Piano/Keys Sounds

Welcome to our new 5 week series from the Tips and Tricks section. This category is all about peeking behind the curtain of what the pros do to bring their mix to the next level. This week we are going to talk about getting great Piano and Keys sounds and over the following 4 weeks we will discuss the dynamics of drums and effective gating, properly setting up guitars for wireless packs, getting the most out of your tracks inputs, and leveraging google to improve documentation and backup of your critical files. These are the topics you probably won’t hear many people talk about or see as the subject in breakouts at your local tech conferences but they are all things that if you don’t do well, will greatly impact your recording session and/or service.

As I just mentioned, this week is all about the piano and keys. We all know the battle here, feedback vs. tonality. Often by the time you’ve gotten that perfect sound from your piano with the perfect locations/combination of microphones, you then add in the band and it’s all messed up or causing all kinds of feedback with the PA at full volume. Why is that? Well to be fair, you did just put two condenser mics on a stage with a live drum set. Be something must be done. You have that piano out there for two probably reasons, the first and most common is just that your grand piano sounds better than your keyboard and brings a certain aesthetic to the stage that people like to see. Probably a lot better. The second is feedback and bleed. Whenever you mic up piano on a band stage with a drum set and full band, you are always fighting bleed from your PA and the drum set and that all brings feedback. Believe it or not there is a solution to be had, in fact, I’m going to propose two!

The first option involves making sure your have a great keyboard or if you can’t afford a new one, have spent a fair amount of time going through and picking the right settings on what you have and going out into your space with the keyboard and really dialing in the sound your PA gives it as well. Even cheap keyboards can be made to sound fairly good with some effort. If you do have a little money than I’d recommend one of two options. The first is to look for a Nord Stage keyboard. This is the keyboard you will see a lot of touring bands use. That is because it sounds amazing. The keys are perfectly weighted and feel like you are playing a real piano rather than just being spring loaded like most keyboard. If you can’t afford the full Nord Stage than they have a version that is just piano without the extra sounds and patched for pads or organ, it’s called the Nord Piano and is priced a bit more affordably. If that is still a bit steep for you check out Roland’s new Juno Keyboard. It’s keys are also weighted really well and this keyboard has been critically acclaimed by several recording artists. But I know what you are thinking, it looks like a keyboard. It doesn’t have that grand piano or upright piano look that I really like. Well, there is a solution for that as well.  A few years ago before we had really refined our keys setup at CCC we had a guest artist come in for our Christmas show and he needed a piano to play. We knew that we didn’t want to have a live mic’d baby grand on stage with the band but that we needed the piano to sound amazing. So, we took out the action of the piano (the keys, pedal system, basically everything but the strings) and slid in our Nord Stage in the hole we had just created. We then hid all the necessary cables by using the piano structure itself to hide everything. With that setup, we got the look of a baby grand on stage for Christmas with the lid open and shiny brass strings, with the clean and crisp sound of the Nord keyboard without any of the feedback or bleed issues we would usually have. For the first time we had our cake and ate it too! But it doesn’t take a baby grand piano to do this, most 88 key keyboards will fit within upright pianos as well.  At CCC, we had a volunteer who wanted to get rid of her family’s half-height upright simply because no one was playing it anymore so we took it, took the action out and slid in our Nord and voila, every weekend we have great keyboard sounds within the aesthetic feels of an upright piano shell. No microphones needed, just a pair of DIs for the outputs of the keyboard. This also works well in the studio for those music video shoots as well and larger band recordings where bleed can be a real issue but aesthetics matter.

The other option a lot of touring groups and churches alike are doing now is using a program called Mainstage. This is a keyboard software that is sort of like the dark horse of the apple software suite in that it never seems to get enough attention but a ton of people are using it. Mainstage is an awesome little $30 piece of software capable of so many things. It comes with a generic suite of sounds that are pretty good but where the good stuff comes in is the sounds you can add. The top three that we use are Native Instruments, Omnisphere, and Alicia’s Keys. Yes, you read that right. There is a patch for Mainstage that is the model of the keyboard that Alicia Keys uses not only for her album but also for her tours. If you pick up mainstage, buy an apple computer (or if you already have one), and pickup some good sounds, mainstage becomes basically the cost of a Nord Piano (potentially cheaper if you already have a mac to run it on). But remember the keyboard you get to work with mainstage is just as important. We used to to use an Akai keyboard that worked pretty well but after a few issues, we just switched to our Nord, which has midi connectivity, to just be the controller for us. All of our players prefer to use the keyboard on the Nord over everything else we’ve used in the past so it just worked out really well. We also wire in the main outputs up so we have a backup keyboard if Mainstage decides to just not work (haven’t had this happen yet but we are ready just in case). There is a definite learning curve here but with mainstage you can get Leslie B3 models, really nice and smooth electric pianos, pads, strings, or really anything you desire. I believe you can also make your own patches from recorded sounds. On top of that, all the sounds are of great quality and can be tweaked to work well in your space or desired sound. Mainstage is basically a plugin rack for your piano. When used wisely, it can be one of the best things you can do. You can also, for that extra cherry on top, can download and use the mainstage patches from bands like hillsong or elevation when you sing one of their songs to get the actual sounds they use.

Well that is it for this primer on great piano sounds. Be sure to comment below with the tricks you use to get that perfect piano sound in your mix. I love learning something new so please, feel free to email me as well at daniel@studiostagelive.com. As always, if you are new to the blog and would like to receive weekly updates or just when new content is released just follow this link, fill out the form real quick, and hit submit. See you next week!

Posted on

Editorial: The Case for Automation/Scenes

Do you remember this video. It floated around the internet a few years back and I didn’t really think much of it other than the fact that I felt this guys pain of going frantic during the show trying to keep everything together. These days my mixing technique is a bit different. I’ve been mixing for almost 18 years now, most of that has been for a church or para-church organization. I’ve seen worship styles come and go, songs be popular, get oversung, and fall away. I’ve mixed on several boards including but not limited to a GL3300, M7CL, LS9, Avid Venue, SC48, Mackie VLZ 2404, and many more. All this is to say, there have been few things I’ve seen that have changed the way I do things so drastically that I can’t not do them if I have the option to. The first was the use of verb which I experienced when I first went out on my own at college and gained access to outboard verbs and the second was just about 5 years ago when I started mixing at Christ Community on our previous console, Avid Venue. What I experienced was using scenes and automating the console. Never before had I had the opportunity to tweak so much about each song I was mixing and be able to have all those settings saved and recalled in an instant for every song in the set. With the advent of digital consoles and now their proliferation amongst audio professionals it is possible for many of us to automate but it seems like many of us don’t. So, this week, I wanted to take some time and talk through the pros and cons of automating and how I get around those issues and get to utilize those strengths on any given weekend here at CCC. I’m going to do the best that I can to do this as unbiased as possible but I am heavily in support of using automation if you are able to do it effectively. I am going to start with the cons than move on to the benefits that creating scenes within your console can provide. 

Probably the biggest reason why some audio techs don’t automate is just that something might shut off or turn on when it shouldn’t. Whether it’s caused by a programming mistake or a glitch in the sound board, if say the pastor’s mic or a lead vocalist for a concert does not come on when it’s time for them to speak, there is an issue and you rest assured people will turn around and look (I know I will). Or maybe it’s just something buried down deep in the fader layers on your console comes on or does something you didn’t want. These are all valid reasons and risks that every technician who automates, including myself, must understand and work to prevent. The key to this one however is not letting the fear of failure prevent you from expanding your skills and upping your game. Mistakes will happen with scenes or without, it’s how respond to our mistakes that can shape our future as audio engineers. The biggest deterrent to this is just to commit to doing it and practice. Whether that is practicing with multi-track playback or just regular old experimentation in some down time, don’t knock it until you’ve actually tried it. 

The next big thing that might be the biggest hurdle to most technicians is the time necessary to setup a show. Whether you’re a volunteer at a church or an hourly tech in a studio, time is always precious. Unless you have multi-track recording bands are only stage for as little as possible so every second you have to be mixing during rehearsal is basically gold. On boards that are already setup and working it may only take a half hour just spent in making the beginning scenes. But if you are newer to a console or the automation system isn’t very robust, it may take quite awhile to get things where they need to be in order for using scenes to be helpful. To help combat this issue I often budget and plan for time to get this setup during rehearsal or stay after to get it ready. I have to upload the rehearsal recording anyway so it isn’t that much extra time. Also, the more you automate, the faster you will be able to set things up. It used to take 45 minutes or so for me to get everything set the way it needs to be but now, I can make, label, and tune 15-20 scenes for a weekend in about 5-10 minutes. This is simply because I do it every weekend and I’m committed to automating everything that it makes sense to automate. 

The last argument against automation that I’d like to talk about is that automating the board can lead to lazy mixes. Because we set each song up as engineers it’s easy to stop mixing because we’ve already done all the work. This however couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our boards aren’t listening to what they are processing and musically manipulating what they hear. That is our job as operators. We should be treating what we do as art, thus we should always be tweaking and mixing so the art doesn’t become stagnant and moves/flexes with the band as they play. Not just changing stuff to change stuff but critically listening and responding to what we hear but also anticipating what we know is coming. Because of the temptation, it’s easy for the automation system to become a handicap instead of an improvement. That’s why I don’t make scenes for instrumental sections in a song or even make multiple scenes per song. I use each scene as the saved start point for that song. The vocals are aligned and bussed correctly around the lead vocal. The instruments are setup for whatever part will be opening the song. The tracks are pre-mixed to where they need to be to start, and most importantly the snare verb is setup, with the rest of the drum set of course (wink wink).

But enough of the negative, what can automation bring to your mix? Well let me tell ya. The biggest thing is just that automating your console is like stopping time, setting all your busses and effects up, than starting it again. Or a having a personal assistant who manages to in the blink of an eye (or with some consoles fading with the time you set) getting everything unique about that song setup. Maybe this song you want more piano in the verb or need to add the acoustic to an FX send, no problem, just program it, hit go, and you’re all good to go. Because all of that gets done without your intervention, it makes it easy to make sure we actually mixing the beginning of the song not just the choruses or the endings. It used to be that you’d setup a verb for each thing you want to use with verb for that event. You had a verb setup for when a girl leads and the same thing for when it’s a guy. You’d setup presets to use with drums that you would have to flip to in a moments notice. You’d have to write down or remember all those settings to plug into the FX processor and scurry about at the beginning of the song to get them setup hoping you don’t push the wrong button and mess it all up just in time to have to abandon it. But now, I can just program those things into the scene, including FX racks so that when I hit the “Go” button, the board sets all those variables for me and when programmed correctly, works every time! Even complex routing or fading is no big deal as you can specify all of that for each scene. In monitor world it’s really helpful if you have multiple leaders and band members that really only want the lead vocal in their mix because at the beginning of each song, the board makes all those changes instantly. Just this last weekend at church I needed to mute the broadcast feed because we didn’t want broadcast a video that we didn’t have rights to which could cause us to lose our ability to stream on facebook. If I wasn’t automating, this would have been a difficult transition to nail perfectly because I’d have to bring down the band inputs, bring up the video input, prep the opps givers mic because he was up next, and fade down the broadcast output master (basically impossible to do quickly) but with scenes, I just programmed what I wanted each to do, checked it once, and hit go the rest of the weekend. Piece of cake. 

Another great reason why we automate here at CCC is to bring consistency between the services. When we automate, we set each cue for how the song needs to start and mix changes from there as the song plays out. Consistent worship is a primary tenant of our tech teams. Having scenes makes sure that no matter which service you come to, the worship will be consistent and predictable and likely sound as good or better than the last time we did that song this weekend. Better you say, yep, because each time we do that song after the scene is made, I can tweak that scene to fix an issue or smooth out a transition. It literally can get better with each pass. Scenes also allow us to make changes in playback that you wouldn’t be able to do if you didn’t have a scene stored. If during rehearsal or perhaps in one of the services we realized we needed more guitar or the kick was just a bit too punchy, in between services or live during the event, we can save in a new setting which will fix the problem next time. At least for me, having saved scenes allows me to mix proactively instead of reactively. If I know my drum sounds are locked in, I can have my finger on the vocals or guitars for the start of the song where they are likely going to need to be pushed instead of trying to get all my effects and stuff set and then getting to the mix sometime around the first chorus and probably missing that opening guitar riff or encouragement from the worship leader.

Lastly, and this applies to lighting as well since they automate as well, if I have created a scene for each song and element in the service, just about anyone who knows how to use the console can step in last minute and run the show. While this doesn’t happen often, a few times in my tenure at CCC myself or one of the other guys who runs FOH will go through rehearsal and maybe even through the Saturday service, call, and say they just can’t make it in for whatever reason. That’s not a huge deal. We have at least a few scenes they they created from rehearsal or a whole show programmed, I just have to walk in, see what’s going on, and take over. To be honest, any of our team members, even our lighting guy, could walk up, learn how to move through the scenes, and use the “go” button to run the show. They don’t even really need to know the service order back to front because there is a scene for everything so at the very least, they can just follow along and try to pull up planning center so I can be ready for anything. This makes mixing accessible to just about anyone in a pinch should something happen. 

So if I’ve sold you on at least trying some automation, here are five quick tips to help get you started in the form of some simple guidelines that will help prevent the easy mistakes from happening.

  1. Know what your board is automating. Take some time to read the manual (shocker right?) and learn what your board can store for you and learn how the system works. If it’s anything like my automation on the SSL it will take some setting up. I often bring in a second tech to think through what should and shouldn’t change each scene. A good policy is to store every possible parameter in every scene and only recall the ones that you want to use (if you recall everything but not store everything you can add the ability to recall something without going into the scene first and adding it, so we save everything and only recall some things). At CCC, we only automate dynamic settings like bus assignments, compression, effects, etc. We do not automate EQs on inputs (with the exception of tracks because what is played can vary quite a bit between songs) or the pre-amp setting. This allows us to have a solid base to build on and make it easy to make the EQ changes we make all time to compensate for our room and have those changes be effective in all scenes.
  2. Don’t use mutes, use faders. We do our best never to mute things. Mutes are always triggered at the top of any scene change and because they are instantaneous make them hard to stop without being noticed. Instead of muting, move the fader down. This not only makes things sound smoother but on many digital consoles you can grab the fader and stop it from moving during a scene change. But, once a mute is programmed it, you will have to un-mute it after it triggers. A nice two second fadeout does wonders for making the band not just disappear when a song is over. This allows you to fade the band gently as their ring out is happening making everything cleaner. It also smooths out transition in broadcast mixes as well so things aren’t just snapping around. Probably the only time we actively use mutes is to have a fader up and muted in the scene before it is needed if I need it on quickly but the band to fade out. I don’t want a crossfade there, I want the mic open and at full volume and the band to fade out.
  3. Don’t create all your scenes before you’ve heard at least one run-through with the band. Once you create scenes it becomes much harder to make big changes. At CCC, we create one scene (called the “worship” scene) we use for rehearsal than after we have the band locked in together and a good general mix we then we copy that scene however many times needed for each song. Than in that last run-through you are tweaking that general mix to be more specific to each song. Plus, when it’s all said and done you are left with an extra scene as a go to just in case something happens. I often map this “worship” scene to a hot-button so that if there is a glitch somewhere I can dump to that and have a scene recalled where I know I have a great sound coming from the band.
  4. Find and use a recall protect button. This is sometimes called “safe” sometimes call “recall protect” but in all cases it locks whatever channel you selected in to it’s current status so that it can only be manually changed and isn’t affected by scene changes. This is also helpful if you are just starting out in automation. You can safe out your lead vocalist and pastor the first few weeks as you are learning your board and not have worry about catastrophic issues. I use it just about every week to get into my message cue from our bumper cue. I know that everything has been programmed correctly in the scenes but I do like to manually open the pastor’s channel before I fade out of our bumper and make sure that transition goes off without a hitch so the people in person and in the broadcast can always here that mic.
  5. Lastly, set aside the time to make sure you program things correctly. Whether this is coming in early or staying late in order to do a quick cue to cue or just checking the scenes you’re not sure about this step is key. At the very worst, do your key speakers or singers sound check in their main scene. Once you’ve created scenes, use them. This acts like another check to see if you’ve got it setup correctly. Remember to keep things simple in the beginning. I used to just automate faders and sends and now even I am surprised what I end up automating for big shows. The things you can change with each song are endless so the key here is to make sure you always improving. If automating is just making your life hard, change it up or back up how much you are doing. It is meant to be a tool, not a distraction.

I hope you enjoyed the post. As always if you have any questions please feel free to comment below or email me at daniel@studiostagelive.com. If you like reading these every week, subscribe at this link, and you’ll receive email notifications of new posts. See you next time!