Status: AVAILABLE |
In order to read or download the mixing engineers handbook text only 2ndsecond edition by b owsinski ebook, you need to create a FREE account.
Download Now! |
eBook includes PDF, ePub and Kindle version
| ✔ Register a free 1 month Trial Account. |
| ✔ Download as many books as you like (Personal use) |
| ✔ Cancel the membership at any time if not satisfied. |
| ✔ Join Over 80000 Happy Readers |
Guaranteed to help you get a great mix regardless of what kind of studio you’re mixing in or the kind of music you’re mixing, you’ll find your mixing chops getting better with each chapter. Plus there’s also a section on the relationship between the bass and drums and how to make this difficult part of mixing easy. Please send an email request along with your school and department to be sent the download link. And once again, thanks for including me in such an important work Jimmy Douglass Award-winning, multi-platinum engineer and mixer Charlotte Wrinch, Canadian Singer-Songwriter I give interns your book and I say, “Here, read this and find out how records are REALLY mixed in the REAL world”, and then they start to blossom. It is a great book. LS It has been working out great!! The kids love it, and it makes my job VERY easy. Bruce Tambling While it doesn’t get in-depth about every topic, it probably mentions every single topic there is. Get this book if you’re just starting to mix or if you want to learn more. Dr. Kenneth Every time I pick it up I learn something. In fact, I just spent a couple hours with it this morning and am now trying out a bunch of the techniques mentioned. Calgary Basic Monitor Setup 3 Steps To Adding A Subwoofer Mixing On Headphones How Loud (Or Soft) Should I Listen. Listening Techniques Listening On Multiple Monitors Listening In Mono Level Setting Methods What Do I Send To The LFE Channel? ?
http://www.netchem.cn/uploadfiles/fckeditor/20200919/16004680558494.xml
Mixing Immersive Audio For Virtual Reality Parallel Compression Compression on Individual Instruments A Drum Compression Primer Compressing Vocals Compressing Loops Compression on the Mix Buss Compression Techniques Using A De-esser Using A Gate Gating Techniques Things To Remember Before Mastering Online Mastering Mixing Internet Distribution MP3 Encoding Mastered For iTunes Alternative Mixes Different Types Of Alternative Mixes Stems They think “Tall, Deep and Wide”, which means to make sure that all the frequencies are represented, make sure the mix has depth, then make sure it has some stereo dimension as well. This reference point can come from being an assistant engineer and listening to what other first engineers do, or simply by comparing your mix to some CD’s, records or files that you’re very familiar with and consider to be of high fidelity. Usually that means that all of the sparkly, tinkly highs and fat, powerful lows are there. Sometimes some mids need to be cut or other frequencies need to be added, but regardless what you add or subtract, Clarity is what you aim for. Again, experience with elements that sound good really helps as a reference point. This is usually done with reverbs and delays (and offshoots like flanging and chorusing) but room mics, overheads and even leakage play an equally big part as well. Does your mix have any of these characteristics ? Certain lyrics that can’t be distinguished. There’s a difference between using something because it’s hip and new and using it because everyone else is using it. What makes a good one. First of all, let’s look at the elements that a great mix must have. This allows mixes to be more intricate than ever, and take more time than ever as a result, but the pinpoint accuracy of every parameter movement during every millisecond of a mix is assured.
http://www.96stone.ru/userfiles/delonghi-pinguino-ct110-manual.xml
Even before automation, mixers were constantly riding instrument and vocal faders during a mix in order to make sure they stood out in certain places or added an extra intensity to the mix. The best part about automation is that those moves can be exactly replicated on every playback. This will help you to be able to hear all the nuances that the dynamics of the mix needs in order for it to be exciting. With credits like Led Zeppelin, Free, Traffic, Blind Faith, The Rolling Stones and most recently Van Halen (to name just a few), Andy has set a standard that most mixers are still trying to live up to. Actually, I start with everything. Most of the people that listen to and tweak one instrument at a time get crap. You’ve just got to through it with the whole thing up because every sound effects every other sound. Suppose you’re modifying a 12 string acoustic guitar that’s in the rhythm section. If you put it up by itself you might be tempted to put more bottom on it, but the more bottom you put on it, the more bottom it covers up on something else. The same with echo. If you have the drums playing by themselves, you’ll hear the echo on them. You put the other instruments in and the echo’s gone because the holes are covered up. If you stare at meters long enough, which is what I did for the first 15 years, you find they don’t mean anything. It’s what’s in your soul. You hope that your ears are working with your soul along with your objectivity, but truly you can never be sure. How can you mix that. It’s impossible. So you learn how to make the bass player play the right parts so you can actually mix. It’s kinda backwards. I’ve been into other people’s control rooms where you see them working on a horn part on its own. And they’re playing with the DDL’s and echo’s and I’m thinking; “What are these people doing?” Because when you put the rest of the tracks up it’s totally different and they think that they can fix it by moving some faders up and down.
https://www.informaquiz.it/petrgenis1604790/status/flotaganis22052022-1927
When that happens, they’re screwed. About the only thing that should move is the melody and the occasional other part here and there in support of the melody. Nowadays, because you have this luxury of the computer and virtually as many tracks as you want you don’t think that way any more, but it was a great learning experience having to do it that way. You know why “Are You Experienced” sounds so good; almost better than what we can do now. Because, when you were doing the 4 to 4 (bouncing down from one four track machine to another), you mixed as you went. There was a mix on 2 tracks of the second 4 track machine and you filled up the open tracks and did the same thing again. Listen to “We Love You”. Listen to “Sargent Pepper’s”. Listen to “Hole In My Shoe” by Traffic. You mixed as you went along, therefore, after you got the sounds that would fit with each other, all you had to do is adjust the melodies. You choose the right instruments and the right amplifiers for the track. If you have a guitar sound that’s not working with the track properly, you don’t use EQ to make it work. It might take a day and it might take four or five different set-ups, but in the end you don’t have to worry about EQ because you made the right acoustic choices while recording. The way you tweak them, that’s where the sound comes from. The sounds come from the instrument and not from the mixer. On rare occasion if you run into real trouble, maybe you can get away with using a bunch of EQ, but you can fiddle for days making something that was wrong in the first place just different. Suppose the predominate frequencies are 1 to 3K. Put a compressor on it and the bottom end goes away, the top end disappears and you’re left with “Ehhhhh” (makes a nasal sound). So for me, compressors can modify the sound more than anything else.
http://guesthouseczestochowa.com/images/97-ford-ranger-manual-transmission-fluid.pdf
If it’s a bass guitar you put the compressor before your EQ because if you do it the other way around, you’ll lose the top and mids when the compressor emphasizes the spot that you EQ’ed. If you compress it first, then add bottom, then you’re gonna hear it better. If you turn it way down low, you can hear everything much better. If you turn it as far as it will go before the speakers freak out, then it pumps. In the middle I can’t do it.This is a lot of work but it’s the only way to go. But you know, I don’t care how close you think you’ve got it that night, you take it home and play it back in the morning and every time there are two or three things things that you must fix. It’s never happened to me where I’ve come home and said, “That’s it”. You hear it at home and you jump back down to the studio and sure enough, you hear what you hadn’t noticed before on all the systems there as well. So every system you listen on, the more information you get. You can even turn up the little speaker in the Studer to hear if your mix will work in mono. If you’ve got a fantastic stereo mix it will work in mono as well. For example, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is a stereo mix released in mono. People don’t listen in mono any more but that used to be the big test. It was harder to do and you had to be a bloody expert to make it work. In the old days we did mono mixes first then did a quick one for stereo. We’d spend 8 hours on the mono mix and half an hour on the stereo. I always need a great plate like an EMT 140 and a short 25 to 32 ms delay just in back of the vocal. If it’s kind of a mid tempo tune then I’ll use a longer delay which you don’t hear because it’s subliminal. It doesn’t always have to be timed to the track; sometimes it can go in the hole so you can hear it. I’ve been talked out of putting reverb on electric guitars, but “Start Me Up” has a gorgeous EMT 140 plate on it. Most studios you go into don’t even have one anymore.
In the old days like on the Zeppelin stuff, you’ll hear very long predelays on vocals. You know what that was. Another thing we used was the old Binson Echorec. Listen to “When the Levee Breaks”. That was me putting two M160’s on the second floor with no other microphones at all because I wanted to get John Bonham the way he actually sounded, and it worked. Page would say that he made me do it but he was down at the pub, but he did bring me his Binson Echorec for the track. I suppose the GML is the easiest but I still have to have somebody there with me to help. That’s the part of the job that pisses me off. You’ve now got to be a bloody scientist. Sometimes it makes you too clever for your own good. If you just learn the tune then you’re in tune with the tune. You let it flow through you. Now you might listen to it years later and say, “I think I missed that one.” Or, you might go, “Fucking hell, I wish I was that guy again. That could not be any better. Who was that man?” Indeed, if you want a mix that’s not only a work of art, but a piece of soul that exactly translates the artist’s intentions, then Elliot’s your man. With a shelf full of industry awards (seven Grammys, an Emmy, four Surround Music Awards, the Surround Pioneer and Tech Awards Hall Of Fame and too many total award nominations to count) from The Eagles, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Sting, John Fogerty, Van Morrison, Toto, Queen, Faith Hill, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Cole, the Doobie Brothers, Aerosmith, Phil Collins, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand and many, many others, Elliot has long been recognized for his pristine mixes. Elliot Scheiner: I was a drummer and I hacked around in a bunch of different bands until I just didn’t want to do it any more. My uncle was a trombone player who was a studio musician in New York City and really good friends with Phil Ramone (legendary producer of Billy Joel, Ray Charles, Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John, and many more).
He knew that I wanted to get into this business, so one day he brought me up to meet Phil. Phil hired me on the spot and I never looked back. Elliot Scheiner: Oh, it was the best. It was maybe the best studio in the country back in 1967 and one of the better ones in the world. Elliot Scheiner: Yeah, they would generally start you as an assistant and I was basically like an assistant to an assistant until I learned what was going on. Obviously the technology was minimal then so you really had to know what mikes to use on what occasions and where to place them and the rest would come at a later date. But the main thing was just how to set up the room for each engineer. Elliot Scheiner: 8 track had just come in and I remember them talking about how wonderful it was, but most people were still primarily using 4 track at the time. I remember Phil making records with Burt Bacharach and Dionnne Warwick and all of those were 4 track dates. Elliot Scheiner: Track 1 would contain horns and strings, track 2 would be the lead vocal, 3 would be the rhythm section and 4 would be background vocals. If there were no background vocals, they would put the strings on 1 and the horns on 4. Elliot Scheiner: I don’t remember exactly how long but it was definitely within a year. I was assisting Phil and he was doing a Jimmy Smith date at night. I don’t remember how many nights we were working on this record but he called me and said “I’m going to be late. You’re going to have to start this date”. You ended up being thrown right into the fire because someone was going to be late or couldn’t make it or was sick. That’s how I started and that’s how pretty much all of the guys I know started. Elliot Scheiner: I went back and forth, but at that point the office knew that I could do some small dates so they started throwing me voice-overs for radio and TV commercials. Eventually I ended up doing advertising and then it moved on like that. Something would develop into another thing.
The theory behind it was that if you left one studio you’d carry the clientele over to another studio. They were in staying at that studio because it was such a great sounding place and it was so service oriented that they were willing to work with someone else that they hadn’t worked with before just to remain there. Elliot Scheiner: Yeah it was. Here all of a sudden I would inherit somebody’s clients that had moved onto another studio just because he’d gone, so that’s how you ended up becoming an engineer. There were a lot of staff engineers that would just float around from studio to studio. It was a lot easier to do it back then obviously. Elliot Scheiner: “Moondance” (Van Morrison’s seminal hit album). I don’t even know if there were any singles off the record because in those days it was just about getting FM radio play. Pop music got the singles airplay; the Frankie Valle and the Four Seasons, and all the Motown stuff. Artists like Van Morrison were more album oriented so what they did was more oriented towards album radio, so it would be hard for me to determine what was a huge hit singles-wise. Isn’t that mostly what you do these days. Elliot Scheiner: Oddly enough, I’ve been tracking lately but I’d have to say that overall the majority of my work is mixing. Elliot Scheiner: I’ve always believed that if someone has recorded all this information, then they want it to be heard, so my philosophy is to be able to hear everything that was recorded. It’s not about burying everything in there and getting a wall of sound. I’ve never been into that whole concept. It was more about whatever part was played, if it was the subtleties of a drummer playing off beats on the snare drum next to the backbeat, obviously he wants that heard. So I always want to make sure that everything that’s in that record gets heard. Granted, maybe there wasn’t as much information when I started as there is now.
I myself have come across files that have been a hundred and some odd tracks, so it’s not as easy to do that today. All of a sudden you’ll be dealing with 7 or 8 different mics on the same instrument. Like, for example, an acoustic guitar will all of a sudden have 7 different viewpoints of where this guitar’s being recorded. It’s mind boggling that you have to go and make a determination and listen to every single channel to decide which one you want to use. And if you pick the wrong ones they come back at you and say, “Oh, we had a different combination” or “It doesn’t sound quite right to us”, but they don’t tell you what they did. So granted, it is a little more difficult to deal with those issues today, but I still take the same approach with every mix. Or do you go in and do some subtractive mixing. Elliot Scheiner: Well, it depends if that’s necessary. I don’t usually get those kind of calls where they say “Here’s a hundred tracks. Delete what you want.” It’s usually not about that. And I have to say that I’ll usually get between 24 and 48 tracks in most cases and hardly ever am I given the liberty to take some of them out. I mean if something is glaringly bad I’ll do that, but to make a judgment call as to whether background vocals should be in here or there, I generally don’t do that. I just assume that whatever an artist and producer sends me is kind of written in stone. They’ve recorded it, and unless they tell me otherwise, I usually don’t do subtractive mixing. Elliot Scheiner: If I’m working at home I’m usually working on my own. Elliot Scheiner: It happens quite a bit because a lot of people don’t want to pay to mix in a commercial studio for financial reasons. I just finished a project last week that was very low budget. The artist and producer live in California and they sent me the files. I was able to do it at a low figure because I could do it when I wanted to and I wasn’t spending anybody’s money except my own.
Elliot Scheiner: Depending on how complicated it is, it usually takes anywhere from 3 hours to a day. Elliot Scheiner: Yeah, well a lot of time you just get a vibe and a feel for something and it just comes together. Then you look at it and say “How much am I actually going to improve this mix.” I mean if it feels great and sounds great I’m a little reluctant to beat it into the ground. I still put Al Schmitt on a pedestal. Look at how quickly he gets things done. He can do three songs in a day and they’ll be perfect and amazing sounding and have the right vibe. So it’s not like it can’t be done. Some people say that you can’t get a mix in a short time and that’s just not true and Al’s my proof. Elliot Scheiner: Out of force of habit, if there’s a rhythm section I’ll usually start with the drums and then move to the bass and just work it up. Once the rhythm section is set I’ll move on to everything else and end with vocals. Elliot Scheiner: I can’t say that there are any rules for that. I can’t say that I’ve ever mixed anything that Al has recorded, but if I did I probably wouldn’t have any on it. With some of the stuff done by some of the younger kids, I get it and go, “What were they listening to when they recorded this.” So in some cases I use drastic amounts where I’ll be double compressing and double EQing; all kinds of stuff in order to get something to sound good. I never did that until maybe the last 5 years. Obviously those mixes are the ones that take a day or more. Elliot Scheiner: Usually I don’t start out with any reverbs. I’m not one for processing. I’d like to believe that music can survive without reverbs and without delays and without effects. Obviously when it’s called for I’ll use it, but the stuff I do is pretty dry. The 70’s were a pretty dry time and then the 80’s effects became overused. There was just tons of reverb on everything. Elliot Scheiner: It’s pretty much dry.
What we used were plates usually Phil wanted to make changing them difficult because he tuned them himself and he really didn’t want anybody to screw with them. There would be at least 4 plates in every room. There was always an analog tape pre-delay, usually at 15 ips, going into the plates. The plates were tuned so brilliantly that it didn’t become a noticeable effect. It was just a part of the instrument or part of the music. You could actually have a fair amount on an instrument and you just wouldn’t notice it. Elliot Scheiner: I would say that you have to believe in yourself. You can’t second guess what you’re doing. I’ve always been of the mind that if I can make myself happy listening to a mix, then hopefully the people that are employing me will be just as happy. If there’s someone there in the room with me when I start a mix I know that sooner or later I’m going to hear whether they hate it or they love it. At this point in my career I know that if people are calling me they like what I do. Just remember that what we do is to convey the artist’s feelings and make it as musical as possible without harming it. But having old school roots doesn’t get in the way of Jimmy working in the modern world, as you’ll see. Yes, he was the man that put me on. It was a great experience except that I was a kid that didn’t know the difference at the time because I’d never seen anyone else make a record. I didn’t even know what making a record was (laughs). When I first went into Atlantic studios, it was the first time that I was exposed to the whole concept of recording. I was living in a suburban town of Great Neck, NY and Jerry Wexler (legendry owner and staff producer for Atlantic) lived there. I was a friend and schoolmate of his daughter, so they gave me this little job of tape copying during high school to make some money for college. It started as a summer job but then I took it into the school year at night because I really liked it.
What’s there not to like (laughs a bit harder)? It was all 8 track. I actually did a mix from a 4 track recording that I was very proud of (and they were proud of me). They let me do “The Best Of Otis Redding”. They let me remix Tom’s mixes, believe it or not. The first thing I did for real was with Jimmy Page (of Led Zeppelin). I taught myself how to edit and all this other stuff, but in their heads I wasn’t ready to be an engineer because I was still just a kid in their eyes. One day Jimmy came in and none of the other engineers were around and everybody’s freaking out because it was Zeppelin’s second album and they were hot. So Jimmy wanted to work but there was nobody around so they asked me to just sit there with him until somebody showed up to take over. I loved Jimmy Hendrix at that point more than anything, so it didn’t exactly impress me that Jimmy Page was there to work. I was a kid of 16 or 17 where you do and think stuff totally differently, so I did the work with that attitude. They kept peaking in to see what was going on and me and Jimmy were having the ball of our lives. I was having a great time and I was doing a good job, so he was having a great time too. It was the era when a record could come out within a week or two of completion, so the next week that record came out. The urgency factor has definitely disappeared. Back in the day when you were using session musicians, they weren’t coming back after you recorded something, so you’d have to get it down correctly and even mixed together (if on 8 track for instance) in the right balance. If you erase anything by mistake, you’re screwed and probably fired. Sometimes we don’t use musicians at all, we use machines. Everything is totally replaceable. As a matter of fact, you can erase a part that somebody played and they’ll just replace the part and nobody seems to care about what’s not there anymore. Back in the day it was a major deal to replace anything.
Record companies want change and yet they don’t want change. They want it to sound like the rough, but they want it to sound different. Someone will hand in a ruff to a record company after taking a lot of time to make it sound good, then they’ll hand it to me to do what I do. When I do what I do they’ll say, “Oh, it doesn’t sound like the rough” and I’ll think, “How am I going to beat a ruff that somebody worked on for a month, in 6 or 7 hours?” So lately I’ve been starting to match the ruff. I never used to listen to them because I didn’t want to be influenced because then I can’t do what I do. Now it’s the opposite. If you don’t get close to the ruff, the mix will probably never be accepted. It’s beginning to change a little bit but I’m a basic 10 or 12 hour man. Back in the day I could mix 4 or 5 songs in a day but I just don’t know how to do that any more. But back then you recorded what you were supposed to hear in the end. Now people want to imagine things they don’t hear. Give us an example. One of the big things is that we might only actually spend maybe 4 hours of the 12 mixing the record because there are so many visitors and interruptions. People think nothing of stopping your mix and taking the time to play a whole record for a friend. I was in the groove, now I’m not in the groove any more and it takes some time to get back into it. We used to listen to records to get ideas or emulate, but you were always working the whole time you were there. Now we might end up staying to 5 or 6AM when we could’ve been done at like 1 in the afternoon (laughs). Back in the day, the only people hanging around in the studio were part of the band or had a really good reason to be there. Now there are people who aren’t connected to the project that are giving their opinion who aren’t really qualified to give an opinion. I mixed the Rob Thomas album and it was totally old school except that we had 3 Protools rigs and a Sonoma (DSD workstation for SACD) in the room.
2 rigs were running at 96k (there wasn’t enough tracks on just one) and one was used to mix back to at 44.1k. It took a while but it was fun and came out great. We used a big board and a lot of tracks. There’s nothing that’s different or blending or making things different, so it’s really kind of simple. A lot of times I’ll even use a stereo mix that the producer gave me because they can’t find the original session to break the individual parts out, so all you’re really doing is just putting the vocal on top. You have to try to make something sound really special out of something that’s not. I’ve developed an approach to making records today. I approach it like fashion. This week tweed might be in, so even if I’m giving you the best silk in the world, you’re not going to be interested. So the one thing that I do is something I call “tuning my ears”. I listen to a lot of stuff in that particular genre to get to know what the particular sound of the day is. You want to sound contemporary and current but you can’t know what that is unless you listen to the records that the audience is digging at the moment. I’m not saying to copy it, I just tune my ears to know what the parameters are. So I listen to the genre to go “Let’s see what’s considered cool today.” All the things we’re talking about I identify with because I was there, but they don’t exist any more. I mixing the box a lot lately because it’s not about the sonics anymore, it’s about the convenience. I can mix over the course of a month and every time I put it up it comes back right where I left it. That’s the benefit. The quality of sound will catch up with you in time though. Andrew Scheps: If I know the song then I already have a pretty clear picture of what I’d like it to be. If not, I’ll usually get that the first time I listen through a track. It’s not so much for the sonics, but more in terms of size, like figuring out how big the chorus will be.
Sometimes I’ll get really specific ideas about effects that I’ll try as well. Andrew Scheps: Kind of, although I don’t use a lot of effects. I use a lot of parallel compression so that’s more of what I have set up. In terms of what gets sent to those compressors, some of it is consistent and some of it changes with every mix, but they’re ready for me at the push of a button, which on an analog console is great because I just leave that part of the patchbay alone. I don’t tend to use many effects because a lot of the stuff I mix is straight up guitar rock and it’s more about the balance and making things explode. Andrew Scheps: You’re never really as aware of your own process as you think you are. I’ll think that I really didn’t do much of anything and then I’ll look at a mix and find that I’m using 50 things on it. There are things that always live in the same place, like channel 24 is always the vocal, so I’m usually figuring out how to lay out everything between the drums and the vocal. I do that while I’m finding out what everything is doing, so there’s a long discovery process where it doesn’t seem like I’m getting much done, but then everything happens really quickly after that. Andrew Scheps: It depends. I’d love to say that I always build it from the vocal, but usually what I’ll do is deal with the drums to get them to act like one fader’s worth of stuff instead of 20 or whatever it is. Once I’ve gone through that process that I just described, everything seems to come up at once. I’ll have listened to vocal and the background vocals and know exactly where they are, but I’ll get the band to work without the vocals first, which I know a lot of people don’t think is a good idea. After 20 years, my brain sometimes unconsciously knows what an instrument will sound like soloed, so I’ll tend to get the tone on things separately, and then it’s all about the balance. I almost never have to go back and change things once I get the vocals in.