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.
5 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.
This is such a useful checklist and I think a great starter for a designer to go off of and then fine tune based on the live situation later. I really liked his note about “stealing” from studio mixes because even though the environment is completely different, the principles are still relatively the same so using the same baselines to mix is really helpful I think. I also think that live mixing puts a lot more pressure on someone with a million other things to think about so having this checklist kind of makes it so that there is one less thing to worry about especially when it is something so fundamental to making the event sound good. I really also appreciate that he focuses on making sure that everything sounds distinct even if they have similar sounds. I think oftentimes details like that make or break the mix because if all the supporting lines sound super muddy and similar, it doesn’t matter if lead vocals and instruments sound good when nothing else does.
I really like this list of questions and I am going to steal it for the next time I mix something. I think having a checklist of yes or no questions is really helpful, especially for something subjective like mixing. It gives a quick and easy guide to make sure you have the basics, and then you can fine tune from there. I also like that these questions are not just “is everything the same volume” but instead it is asking if everything is the volume it needs to be for its role to be clear. You do not want the drum and the vocalist to be the same volume. The drum would be too loud. You want the drum to be loud enough that it is leading the other instruments and is still clear, but is not overpowering anyone. It is also helpful that if the answer to these questions is no, the article gives a few ways to narrow down and address the problem.
I think the list given is a great checklist for live sound mixers to go through. It makes sense that the author took from the studio sound mixing world and adapted it to live work. Learning from other industries and workers is a great way to enhance the work you do yourself. Reading through the list, each one makes a lot of sense both how it was taken from studio mixing and how it is being applied to live mixing. I think the best advice from this article is giving each instrument its own space to breathe and that mixing them together too much will take away from the soundscape of the song or performance. While I hae not yet mixed live shows, I am excited to start trying and learning how to apply all these tips that the author has given us. I hope to be collect as much knowledge and useful information about sound mixing as I can before I start practicing with hands on experience.
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