Thinking In & Out of The Box

SMASH IT UP!

Speaking of which, for over-compression, analogue is the way to go. Plug-in manufacturers are getting closer at emulating nonlinear distortion artifacts, but smashing a drum room mic through an analogue Universal Audio 1176 with all ratio buttons in still wins every time. Purposely mangling a room mic with wheezy old compressors is less risky and exacting than the subtle art of printing gentle compression (which must be exactly right for the track). Over-compression is a ‘so wrong, it’s right’ sort of thing. Go out on a limb and add extra room mics, placed in interesting sounding areas of the studio, mangled a bit with compression. They add a uniqueness to the drum sound. You can always mute the tracks if they’re not happening in the mix. I stick mics in airlocks, stairways, loading docks, anywhere, while tracking drums with the doors ajar so the ambience spills into them. It’s difficult to get this ‘realness’ (or oddness) from plug-ins.

HOUSE OF HORRORS

We’re ready to take our files into a project studio for mixing, so let’s look at the environment we will be working in. The single most important ingredient in a great mix is a good song, tightly arranged and well-performed. Another essential ingredient is accurate monitoring in a space with good acoustics. I’m shocked by the frequency peaks and troughs caused by standing waves and the smearing and bizarre resonances from flutter echoes and comb filtering that I hear in project studios I visit. To walk out of these rooms with a decent mix takes more luck than skill and if it were done successfully, I’d want to take the mix engineer to the casino with me.

The internet is your friend. There’s a wealth of information online about room acoustics [don’t forget to check out our Acoustics Special in the last issue of AT — Ed.]. I would rather work with the most basic plug-in package in an acoustically well-treated room than work with a full-blown analogue equipment package in a space with horrible acoustics that reduce EQ decisions to guesswork. A discussion about the differences of mixing in analogue or digital rooms should not be had without mentioning room accuracy. Many purpose-built analogue mix rooms sound fine while the majority of project studios I’ve visited have acoustics that suck. In this regard, you get what you pay for. But it doesn’t take a huge bankroll to solve the problem. Get real about it, do the math yourself, use your ears and experiment and then treat your room with absorption accordingly. Your mixes will improve.

While I’m on the subject of acoustics, what’s with these one-size-fits-all prefab computer desks with the speaker shelves and equipment racks built in? Is the distance these plywood monstrosities allocate between the speakers the right measurement for speaker placement in your room from the back wall and side walls? Most likely not. For drone work, like editing and some basic overdubbing, they get the job done and are cost-effective. But if you want to make serious mix decisions, the distances between the speakers themselves, the listener and the surrounding walls are all critical.

BOXING THE CLOWN

There has been much debate about the superiority of ITB mixing (In The Box mixing, meaning mixing in the digital domain) or OTB mixing (Out of The Box, mixing on an analogue desk). Summing mixers, most of which do not have level or panning controls, blur this distinction to the point where I’m not sure whether I mix ITB or OTB. The computer and its converters are the brains and the engine of my own mix room, but a patchbay and some high-end analogue gear along with a transformer-balanced device to mix these together is what brings project studio mixing up to my requirements for sound and workflow.

I use parallel analogue compression on the drums, as well as analogue compression on the mix bus, so I need more converters than just a stereo pair. Twenty-six converter outputs, a summing mixer and a patch bay give me flexibility and amazing bang for the buck compared to the price tag of analogue mix rooms I’ve built. I chose a summing mixer with a discrete monitor control section because making critical mix decisions while listening through a cheap Chinese-made volume controller full of IC’s does not give an accurate or open sound.

I recommend having at least one stereo pair of excellent-sounding A/D and D/A converters. Use them to convert your analogue summed mix to digital monitor and monitor the mix through them. Because overdubs in home mix rooms usually don’t require more than a stereo pair of inputs, they can capture all overdubs as well. Do high-end converters make much difference to the sound? Maybe not so much if you’re tracking with brittle Chinese condenser mics through cheap preamps or printing a narrow, boxy-sounding mix. But if you’re tracking with great gear in a great studio like Mixmasters, and the audio you are putting into those converters sounds great, it helps to keep it that way.

HIT THE ROAD

Now that we have a simple mix room that doesn’t make us go screaming from the building with our fingers in our ears, let’s get mixing. First steps: remove as much extraneous noise from the tracks as possible, without choking the sound, and edit any obvious performance flaws that become apparent while listening carefully. Mixing is driving a song down an unknown road with a direction determined, but not always an exact destination. doing this with a filthy windscreen, no defogger and crap shock absorbers is difficult. Before I navigate the more creative turns of a mix, I get a clearer outlook and smoother ride by cleaning and preliminarily balancing the tracks and making sure the gain structures afford plenty of headroom, both in the DAW and into the analogue gear.

Usually, I start with the tom drums. For them to have an impact in the mix, the close mics may be loud enough to add extraneous low masking frequencies between the tom hits. Often, I will go through the track and manually cut all but the hits and their decay, fading the exact end of the decay before the next downbeat. A noise gate or expander plug-in is a quicker solution but they can choke on or pass (and amplify) the cymbal crash that follows a roll. Manual editing is a way around these unwanted artifacts. I also use plug-in gates or expanders on the kick and snare, with key input filtering. High pass filters and subtractive EQ remove other extraneous noise and superfluous frequencies. I’ll then balance the instrumental and vocal tracks a bit, listening to them with the drum tracks to determine which combination of the drum mic arrays best suit the song. Even if 16 channels of expensive drum mics have been tracked, they needn’t all be used. An odd combination, like a ribbon mic behind the drummer, phase reversed and blended with the front of kick mic, may be all the drum channels the song needs.

A major difference in the way I mix drums on a digitally-based system is outputting all the drum tracks through a single stereo pair of the converters. Using a half-normalled patchbay, I also send the pair into an analogue compressor returning in parallel to the drum mix. Mixing Slow Chase, I’m using an Alan Smart C1 VCA compressor with a 4:1 ratio, 3ms attack, and 0.1ms release. I keep the detector circuit unlinked because I don’t want a loud floor tom hit on the left channel sucking down a cymbal on the right channel. To balance the compressed and uncompressed drum pairs, I use the makeup gain controls on the unit. I like the snap SSL-type compressors give to drums, though I usually find them too aggressive for the mix bus. After years of splitting the drums across a dozen or more analogue desk channels, it felt strange to output an entire drum mix on two channels. Now i’m noticing that this simplified approach encourages me to treat the drum kit as one instrument instead of many different elements. I can quickly and easily control the shape and dynamics of the drum sound with the attack, release, ratio and output controls of the parallel compressor.

A difference to consider while using this approach is the amount of compression on the drum signal being sent to reverbs or delays. When mixing on an analogue desk, the sends to the effects are typically post-insert, which means they are compressed to the degree the channel’s instrument is. But when the reverb or delay is from plug-ins, the signal is being sent to the effect before the outboard compression is applied. My workaround for this is to insert a compression plug-in on the reverb auxiliary return channel before the reverb plug-in. I like the additional dynamic control of the reverb this gives. I use the wet/dry balance on the plug-in compressor to emulate the balance of the drum pair and its parallel compressor. I may compress the signal into the reverb more or less heavily depending on the dynamic change I want in the reverb. When using convolution reverb to mimic a ‘real’ drum environment, I sometimes send it out the main stereo drum outputs so the reverb is compressed — as a drum room mic might be. But if I’m using the reverb for space and expansiveness, I send it into the summing mixer through a stereo pair designated for effects returns with no compression.

These compression considerations can also apply to the lead vocal’s plug-in effect sends and returns when I’m using an outboard compressor on the vocal. If I want a distressed, vintage-type sound, (like a vocal into a harmonica mic through a guitar amplifier with a bit of spring reverb or tape slap), I mono effects and send them and the vocal into the outboard compressor.

BUS DRIVERS

I use a high-end compressor and a program equalizer on the mix bus. I insert them between the outputs of my summing mixer and the inputs of my Universal Audio 2192 converters, and monitor the 2192 post DAW. Once the basic rhythm section and main instrumental elements are tidied up and generally balanced against each other, I’ll start playing around with them. With subtractive EQ on these tracks already applied by plug-ins, adding low frequency expansiveness and high frequency ‘air’ with the mix bus program EQ results in less need for EQ boosting on individual tracks. I use the mix bus compressor for added analogue characteristics (tube and/or transformer artifacts) and for contouring the shape of the mix more than for level control. I take the stereo outputs of the summing mixer back into my ProTools system through Universal Audio 2192 convertors.

GET IN & GET OUT

So let’s recap: let someone else deal with the continual financial stress of operating a tracking facility large enough to accommodate full band recording. Do thorough preproduction preparation. Get in and out of a tracking studio with the best performances and the most sonic possibilities for the mixes you can in the time you have. Get your monitoring environment true enough to make informed mix decisions and add some analogue power and goodness to your ITB mix to avoid it sounding, well, boxy… and don’t forget to get paid.