ProSoundWeb: It’s OK to steal. Wait – allow me to rephrase that. It’s OK to steal from studio engineers.
Live audio is a different beast compared to what happens in the studio, yet my live mix quality skyrocketed once I started reading the works of studio engineers Roey Izhaki, Bobby Owsinski, and Mike Senior.
2 comments:
These questions are fairly accurate and broadly applicable from my standpoint. I liked question six especially, “Is the mix generating the expected energy?” I think this is a great check in question and a reminder that we are mixing for a live audience and how they react is part of the mix, or at least an extension of the mix. Most of the other questions are more technical based and look at the actual individual elements of the mix. That kind of critical and real time analysis is of course important, and is a lot of what makes mixing so fun for me because it keeps you on your toes, but I agree with this author that it behooves mixers to take a moment to also analyze the effect the mix is having. I would be curious to see the original set of questions that the author was working from and they differ being for studio mixes instead of live mixes.
Though i'm not all too interested in sound design or sound engineering from a theater consumers perspective, these are crucial questions because they are centered around the audience member’s experience. Its important to always keep in mind that the audience member is experiencing these sounds for the first time, so key things such as the lead vocalist or speaker being heard and how they interact with the main instruments are really important. I do think that there can be a really effective experience when the instruments or background noise blend and mix with the vocalist or actor’s voice to depict a kind of chaos, which can be super duper cool. The last question in the article of ‘will i let another engineer critique my mix’ is an interesting question. I think ideally, yes one hundred percent. Theater and live performance is an inherently extremely collaborative art. We all need to remove our ego from our work as hard as it is to improve.
Post a Comment