Listening in the context of recording and mixing music requires a completely different set of skills in addition those of a practicing musician. Much as there is a requirement for musicians to have accurate hearing in terms of relative pitch, a sound engineer, producer and mastering engineer need to analyse recorded music and sound from a completely different perspective.
Many musicians who have been involved in recording at a studio
may have found some of the decisions made by the engineer, or producer
quite difficult to understand. This usually has more to do with varying
perception of what a good sound is, from an engineers point of view. A
musician will often be used to hearing a certain instrument from a
certain position. This is rarely how a listener will hear the same
instrument. Acoustic guitarists sit behind the instrument and the
detail in the sound eminates from the front. Electric-guitarists often
use combos placed on the floor behind them. They often play more loudly
than they need to because they can't hear the detail from the speakers.
Guitar combos are also often designed to take advantage of the
acoustics of a relatively lively, live environment, so a guitarist is
used to hearing a large amount of room-reflection as part of the
guitar-sound.
This is hardly surprising, considering that they are so far wawy from
the axis of the loudspeakers. Drummers often think that a mix sounds
incorrect unless the drums are over-prominent in the mix. It is also
quite common for a drummer to expect the stereo image of a drum kit to
appear in reverse to the way an audience would interpret it. The
drummer has, after all, spent maybe years sitting right behind the kit
and hearing a disproportionately loud amount of sound with a very wide
stereo image. Bass-guitar players are often so used to hearing the bass
amplifier very close to themselves that they expect to hear more bass
in a mix than would really be appropriate.
A musician endevouring to mix music must seek to listen with new ears,
considering the balance of sounds in the context of a composition,
rather than a display of a perticular musicians talents. The listener
is not usually interested in the sound of one particular sound, but the
context in which they sit together and the effect this has on the
performance as a whole.
One of the most important concerns for listening whilst mixing
music is that the over-all balance will be pleasing to anyone listening
to the final product across a range of different media. Listeners could
be using any one of a host of methods for delivering your product to
their ears. Unless your mix is neutrally balanced it has very little
chance of being effectively delivered. This is not to say that a mix
should not have character. Clearly the character of a mix can elevate a
performance and artistic production can easily make the difference
between an 'average' and an outstanding recording. Many people
considering recording assume that it is acceptable to monitor and mix
through domestic Hifi and relatively poor quality headphones. This is
simply not the case. If your music is to be delivered via different
media, or even though different Hifi systems, the sound will vary
consderably. Each pair of speakers and headphones have their own sound.
Unless an approach is taken whereby you seek to find some average
between the sound of all possible systems, your hard work is very
likely to be in vain. Even the sound through studio monitors can vary
to a significant degree, but control monitors are built with a
different approach in mind. Hifi usually seeks to flatter sounds in a
seductive, but completely inaccurate way. Monitors seek to represent
sound as accurately as possible. This means that when we have managed
to create a mix with a neutral tonal balance, Fred/Freda can take it
home and play with the sound to thier taste, but out mixes are
relatively preserved. If we were to use a Hifi, rather than a neutral
monitoring system, the lack of audial perspective available to us would
cuase us to be inclined to reduce frequencies which sound to loud and
to raise areas which sound lacking. This will cause an end result to
sound good on only one system, the one it was mixed through, almost
without exception.
Even though studio monitoring systems in professional studios can cost
many thousands of pounds, with the popularity of home recording
many economically viable solutions are available, but the
results you will be able to obtain will vary dramatically depending on
the acoustics of the room in which you place your monitors, how you
position them, how you choose to adjust the acoustics and the level at
which you listen whilst recording and mixing. This is a subject all of
its own and far to in-depth to be explained here, but there are many
sources of useful information available, some of them below.
One matter that every aspiring recordist should seriously consider is
that of obtaining a good pair of headphones. Since the aocustic
environment inside a pair of headphones is always the same, very good
judgements about over-all tonal balance can be made without the
decisions we make being subject to the sound of a room. A pair of
excellent, professional quality headphones will cost around £80 or
above, but the investment should pay for itself very quickly. This is
perhaps even more important now that so many listeners use MP3 players
and computers with earphones or headphones as thier preferred way of
listening to material. Good, closed-back headphones are also
important for monitoring whilst recording. They will isolate the sound
from any microphones though which you are recording, avoiding
headphone-bleed. The AKG DT100 is the industry standard headphone. An
extended bass version, model DT150 is also an excellent choice.
When a recording engineer sets up the sound for an instrument to be recorded, the objective is to capture the sound in as much detail as possible, but as soon as multiple sounds are played back together, any overlap in the frequencies of each instrument will begin to mask the detail of all the sounds in the overlapping area and also often at higher frequencies. This phenomina is know as psychoacoustic masking. It is impossible to completely avoid, but the job of a mixing engineer is to layer the sounds in such a way that the exciting details in each sound continue to be revealed. This often involves selecting certain areas within the frequency spectrum of a particular instrument and removing this area of the spectrum from other instruments to allow the detail through in the mix according to the musical context of a particular part of a track. This may at first sound like a peculiar way to operate, but it is usually far more effective than simply turning up the lead instrument for part of a passage since to some degree the sounds which overlap will still mask the detail in the desired sound. It can already be seen that the process will alter the other sounds. This will be the case for most of the sounds in a mix, so it quickly becomes obvious that few, if any of them are likely to remain exactly as they were recorded. The art of mixing can be considered to come into play long before the recording process begins! In fact considerate arrangement of a number, way back in the process of writing the material will likely yield a better mix, because the choice of instruments and sounds can be chosen to suit the material in a musical context at this stage, rather than seeking to somehow "fit" them into a mix later on. This is one of the most powerful features of recording with computers in a home environment.
Considering how e set of sounds might interact with each other
in a mix is one of the most basic steps toward obtaining the desired
mix. If a recording was recorded live, it is quite possible that
you will seek to preserve the acoustic qualities of the venue, but if
you have recorded the tracks in a home, or studio setting, it will be
important to consider how you place the instruments in the virtual
acoustic environment you will create during your mixdown. This is not
simply a case of choosing a nice Reverb. It also has much to do with
adjusting the tonal quality of the instruments so that they "appear" in
the right perspective according to their position in the stereo (or
surround) field. Consider for a moment, the sound of one
vocal line recorded to sound as dry as possible. Apart from the
qualities of the singers voice and microphone there should be a minimum
of artifacts from the room in which the track was recorded. How might
we
go about placing this sound nearer or further away, or even perhaps
make it sound as though it is coming from behind us in the mix?
It is quite possible to take this kind of approach with some
understanding of the way in which we percieve distance and position.
The Human ear tends to consider the same recorded sound, played back at different levels to have different tonal character. At quieter levels a sound will seem lacking in lower and higher frequencies, whilst at higher levels the same sound will be percieved as having more bass and treble. We percieve sounds which have a more rounded tone to be at a closer proximity. This can be used to an engineers advantage. Careful shaping of a sound to subtly enhance or remove these frequencies allows us to place a sound of the same level further away or closer to the listener.
Stereo positioning is not simply about panning a sound from left to right in a stereo mix. Our ears obtain information about position from a combination of delay and equalisation information as well. The skull and pinna (the outer ear) adjust the tonal quality we hear according to an objects position relative to the head. We can also percieve very short amounts of delay. These three factors give the brain enough information to place an object not only between left and right, but also above and behind the subject. With a little clever routing it can even be made possible to make a psuedo-surround mix in stereo!
Yet more information about positioning and distance comes from the reflection of sound. Even in an open air environment there is usually one reflection from the ground between a sound and our ears. Removing this can give the impression that a listener is in a void, or above the ground. Positional information from a set of virtual surfaces (reverberation) is only one method of adding spaciousness to a mix. In (virtual) reality we have a vast pallette of tools to place objects in our aural images.
When an engineer creates a virual aural landscape it is important to recognise that the listener is effectively blindfolded. Hearing is a process which works in tandem with sight to give the brain enough information about real- life events, so with the sight element removed we can tinker with this perception. In many situations, with a little imagination we can create situations which could not exist in the real world. One particular possibility is to place a sound inside someones head. This is the sensation which can be acieved by turning the left and right channels completely out of phase with each other.
As can be seen, equalisation can be used in far more creative ways than just as means to alter the tone of an instrument. Delay is not just an effect for phazing, chorus and echo. Reverberation is not just for filling out a mix or simply putting a hall around a band, but most importantly of all, learining to listen bearing all these factors in mind will give a DAW user a greater pallette to use. Allways remeber that most listeners don't know what they are listening for, only if they like or dislike what they hear. If a recordist makes greater use of the ability to listen to and recognise the finer detail in sounds, the end results will have qualities which a listener may not be able to define, but will appreciate.
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