Pro Sound Web: The sound of microphone techniques, effects and EQ in a recording can be hard to translate into engineering terms.
For example, what EQ should you use to get a “fat” sound or a “thin” sound?
The glossary below may help. It’s based on conversations with producers, musicians, and reviewers over 30 years.
3 comments:
It was often humorous to hear a former choir director of mine use terms such as these to describe sound issues to the FOH Mixer, when he wasn't entirely sure what their definitions were. They would both benefit from a read of this article. Although the definitions of these terms can be subjective, this provides a great baseline point of reference for anyone attempting to communicate sound issues or positive observations to those controlling the mix.
If Art is about collaboration then communication is key to that collaboration. Even if not everyone can completely agree on every term in this glossary, like Will said, it can only be a step in the right direction to finally get people at least close to the same page when talking about sound support. These terms are all so nontechnical to begin with that ANY attempt at codifying them has to be helpful.
Wow this article is great! As Will said, these types of descriptive words are very subjective and intuitive to each person, and therefore creating a guide that will work for everyone was impossible, but this guide does a great job at covering the basics. The guide is great in that a lot of the times it gives a technical description of what is happening, along with a brief description of the word (i.e. for "WOOLY, BLANKETED," they said "Sometimes, an emphasis around 250 to 600 Hz" in addition to describing the term). This guide would also be a great resource to give to worship leaders, bands and choirs (in a church setting), or a director (in a theatrical setting) to help them communicate what discrepancies they are hearing in the sound mix.
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