Friday, October 29, 2021
EQ Your Vocal Reverb Return
www.sounddesignlive.com: So, Sean, I definitely want to talk to you about this topic of finding your sound tips for mixing live vocals and sound system calibration. But before I do that, after you get a sound system set up, what’s one of your favorite pieces of music to play through it to get more familiar with it.
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3 comments:
I was super out of my depth reading this article. I wanted to read it primarily because of my time in Power/Trip, where I was A2 and a bit of that time was spent trying to figure out what was going on in the booth, or how mic testing ended up because I know that I don’t have a good palette for sound in terms of differentiating different aspects, though in retrospect some of that feedback might be in terms of mechanical measurements on the board. On that note, one thing that’s struck me at CMU so far is how we’ve been learning to feel out a lot of projects, maybe not drafting or one or two other things, but in a lot of ways its experimenting with new materials or adhesions in projects and getting practical feeling for how things are put together rather than a strict set of directions for how to do it.
Reading articles like these makes me realize just how much I actually have to learn about live sound and sound systems. I think most of my knowledge in sound design resides in how to create sound effects and especially how to use your spread of speakers while making cues to perfectly pinpoint your sound effects. I've been trying to get experience in other areas of live sound (music and live speaker events for example) to fill out my knowledge in system design and live mixing. EQing and effects usage are still things that I really need to work on. I like the advice that this article gives about music playlists for testing systems. I have always had a "play something and make sure you can hear it" mentality when testing systems, but I never really thought about what kind of music you'll be playing and if the system is designed to play that kind of music well based on frequency range and instruments. Really goes to show that the more I learn, the less I know.
Some of these elements of recording, mixing, mastering, and other tasks in sound and music production so often gets overlooked, and it can be a really interesting topic if you dive into it. Right at the top, the one that I really liked was the idea of 'designing' or at least imagining the sound texture and color that you want before you actually get into the studio. There's a lot of temptation (not just in sound, LED color changing fixtures can be a candy store for an unprepared lighting designer as well) in the modern world of digital sound consoles and high end DAWs that all have so many built in effects processors to just start with the material and play around until you find what you really want. There's room for a little bit of that, but I think often it's a trap that leads to an unfocused result. If you don't know what you want going in, you probably won't get what you want coming out.
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