On first read, personally speaking, this chapter was a little difficult to digest, and it did take me some time to set up five separate reverbs to understand the concepts. However, it was time well spent as it truly demystified the elements of the reverb processing, and the power of the processing. Review Summary The chapter on compression was quite good in a lot of ways. He really explains all the different controls and parameters of compression, but then gives you no real idea how to use it on individual instruments, aside from generalities. Figure 7.2 A static arrangement can undermine the structure of your song, so try to prune your parts to emphasize each section with some kind of arrangement change. An example of this would be to mute the lighter-shaded parts in the hypothetical arrangement shown here. FocalPress is an imprint of Elsevier 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, UK

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What You’ll Learn From This Book This book will teach you how to achieve release-quality mixes on a budget within a typical small-studio environment by applying power-user techniques from the world’s most successful producers. Using these same methods, I’ve carried out dozens of mix makeovers for Sound on Sound magazine’s popular “Mix Rescue” series, working on mass-market gear in various home, project, and college studios. If you head over to www.soundonsound.com, you can find before/ after audio comparisons for every one of these remixes, and this book is a one-stop guide to pulling off these kinds of night-and-day transformations for yourself. Part 1 Hearing and Listening or deforming under its own considerable weight. Failing that, old carpets can deliver something like the same result if mounted in a similar way and may be a cheaper option if you can get hold of them as scrap. Lower frequencies need larger areas of treatment, so if you feel the need for limp-mass trapping for a troublesome room mode in one particular dimension, then you should think in terms of trying to treat pretty much the whole of one of the relevant room boundaries, even though this will inevitably reduce the area you can use for your studio gear. Because the size of air gap behind the trapping adjusts its absorptive properties, it’s a good idea to mount the matting on some kind of movable wooden frame if possible, so that you can use trial and error to strike the best balance between resonance reduction and loss of workspace. This kind of trapping is a lot less predictable than simple mineral-fiber absorbers, because it is itself to some extent resonant, so be prepared to spend a bit of time refining the setup to get the best out of it. Some variations worth considering are adjusting the fixing points for the matting, as well as hanging drapes, thin boards, or mineral-fiber panels in parallel. It’s not an exact science, but if you’re faced with heinous low-end resonance problems and a meager budget, then it can nonetheless be a viable bacon-saver. In the specific basement room I mentioned earlier, putting in free-hanging sheets of barrier matting across most of the width of the room and about a meter away from the rear wall was able to bring the worst low-end problems under control, and the loss of that workspace was a small price to pay for usable monitoring. Delay-based Effects: Another group of processes which involve overlaying one or more echoes onto the signal. Where these effects become complex, they can begin to artificially simulate the reverberation characteristics of natural acoustic spaces. First off, he proudly states in the beginning that this book is based on his research into the studios of over a 100 engineers. Yet, we only get occasional quotes from one or two of them on any given topic. As a huge fan of older Bryan Adams records, I’d kill to know, for example how R.J. Lange or Bob Clearmountain approach a mix. How do they handle guitars? Vocals? None of that is in here. If you’re looking for more meaty info specifically on how different producers handle these subjects, the book “The Mixing Engineers Handbook” has huge amounts of that. Full interviews with engineers/producers on these subjects.

Part 1 Hearing and Listening Each room mode will generate its own regularly spaced series of nodes and antinodes between the A single room room boundaries, and if this means that there’s mode can easily push its a node in your monitoring sweet spot, you’ll resonant frequency 20dB out of hear a drastic frequency-response dip at that kilter, so only a flying pig is likely to room mode’s resonant frequency, whereas if find a good listening position when there’s an antinode at the listening position, several room modes are active you’ll hear a significant level boost at that freat the same time. quency instead. Because each pair of parallel room surfaces will contribute its own independent series or room modes, and most rectangular domestic rooms offer three pairs of parallel surfaces, small studios typically find themselves liberally peppered with nodes and antinodes at different frequencies. Figure 8.1 One possible example of sensible mix dynamics for a typical short song structure. The choruses are more intense than the verses, and each chorus is more intense than the previous one. CHAPTER 16 Mixing with Reverb..........................................................231 CHAPTER 17 Mixing with Delays...........................................................255 CHAPTER 18 Stereo Enhancements.......................................... 261 CHAPTER 19 Buss Compression, Automation, and Endgame..................273 CHAPTER 20 Conclusion.......................................................................301 APPENDIX 1 Who’s Who: Selected Discography....................................303 APPENDIX 2 Quote References............................................................321 APPENDIX 3 Picture Credits.................................................................329 INDEX...................................................................................................331 Whatever you actually sit the speakers on, their exact positioning is also critical to getting good audio reproduction. You should try wherever possible to aim the speakers directly at the listening position. A speaker’s frequency response is measured on axis (i.e., from directly in front of it), so if you listen off axis, you won’t be hearing what the designer intended you to—high frequencies are more directional than low frequencies, so high-end details in particular tend to suffer. Moving around your listening room should amply demonstrate these effects with any full-bandwidth music mix, but if you want to hear the phenomenon at its starkest, then try listening to a constant full-range test signal such as my PinkNoise file through just one of your speakers. These aren’t just miniscule sonic niceties we’re talking about. High frequencies are also easily shadowed by physical objects, so make sure you can actually see the drivers you’re listening to. Aiming the speakers isn’t just about the horizontal plane either, because vertical alignment is usually even more important, for a couple of reasons. The first is that on most nearfield monitors, the cabinet is profiled around the tweeter to create what’s called a waveguide, which is designed to horizontally disperse the jet of high frequencies more widely and thereby increase the size of the optimum listening area (or “sweet spot”). Although waveguides can be quite effective at this, they don’t usually do the same job for the vertical high-frequency dispersion and can even make it narrower. But the second reason is that most nearfield monitors have more than one driver in them, with each driver in a different vertical position. A dedicated bit of circuitry or DSP (called a crossover) within the speaker splits the incoming signal’s frequency range between the different drivers at factory-specified boundaries (called crossover frequencies). Although ideally the crossover should therefore prevent any overlap between the frequency output of the different drivers, the truth is that there is inevitably a small spectral region around each crossover frequency where two drivers are both contributing significant levels at the same time. If the distance from each driver to the listening position isn’t the same, then the signalsAnd, as an extra added bonus, he does so with humor. And some days, when it's just you and that recalcitrant song mix punching each other silly in the arena, you need that! great way to start building your knowledge. The two books cover just about everything you need to get your home studio up and running. Book Review of ‘Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio’ by Mike Senior your singer from transforming into a chipmunk when you’re shifting the pitch upward. For small tuning-correction shifts, though, switching off the formant adjustment won’t appreciably affect a sound’s character in a lot of cases, and it may again improve the smoothness of the corrected sound. Different offline pitch shifters do vary a great deal in design, though, and many of their parameters are frankly incomprehensible too, so the main thing is just to use your ears while editing. If you’re disappointed with the way the processed sound emerges from its transformation, then take the time to tinker with at least some of the available settings. No pitch processing is perfectly transparent, but that’s no reason to let more side effects through the net than absolutely necessary. An equally important cornerstone of the production process in many styles is the use of synthesizers (which generate audio signals electronically) and Figure 8.6 A typical fader control scale. Fader movements around the unity (0dB) gain position will give smaller and more precise gain changes than fader movements toward the bottom of the level scale.