Author: Eric Oehler

Senior Engineer

Founder and owner of Submersible Studios, Eric enjoys talking about microphones and buying audio software he doesn't especially need. He also spends an awful lot of time with a RTA and a reference mic trying to get the acoustics of the studio juuuust right.

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Case Studies

Case Study: Folk-Rock, singer-songwriter

The Challenge: much of the album was very simply arranged – singer, acoustic guitar, occasionally some light drums. This was washed with a fairly strong reverb. However, on a handful of tracks, a small string ensemble had been added, mixed very wide, and liberally doused in the same reverb. On headphones, it sounded lush and wide, but on a standard stereo system, the wide strings overwhelmed the mix, drowning the vocals. It was the kind of issue that one would hope would be fixed in the mix and not the mastering stage, but the project was beyond the mix stage and couldn’t go back, so it was up to the mastering process to deal with it.

The Solution: This presented two real issues – while it was possible to reduce the wash of reverb and strings on the tracks where it was most pronounced, it would then make the overall sound of the album less cohesive, so any twiddling done to the dense tracks would have to be done at least to an extent to the remaining tracks.

Every track was parallel-bussed and encoded into middle and side channels. The side channels were then either reduced in volume or given a downward expander and some EQing to reduce their prevalence without removing them entirely. Additional stereo-image processing was done on the side channels with the overly-wide strings to place them less overwhelmingly in the stereo image.

Categories
Case Studies

Case Study: Vocal Electronic remix album

The Challenge: Remix albums provide a very special set of intricacies, as there are commonalities to all the album content – namely the source material – but usually widely different interpretations thereof. In some ways, it’s even trickier than a compilation, as the level of consistency is required to be higher.

The Solution: Very careful adjustment of loudness and equalization was required, along with judicious use of harmonic coloration to balance the overall density and sound of 14 different remixes of 5 tracks. The harmonic coloration (“warming”) helped give some of the more digital-sounding tracks a more console-ish sound, to help match those other tracks which had in fact been recorded on higher-end hardware. A multiple-pass on Equalization allowed each track to first sound more in line with the other tracks, as a sort of “baseline” EQ curve, which could then be adjusted to the needs of the individual track. Maintaining consistency was the key.

Categories
Case Studies

Case Study: Indian Classical Ensemble

The Challenge: record, mix and master a small indian classical ensemble, often performing pieces up to 45 minutes long, maintining the ability to use multiple takes, while managing isolation of individual instruments.

The Solution: This was tricky. First, there was the recording stage. The ensemble consisted of a saxaphone, a violin, and a mridangam. For the sax, a dark tone was requested by the performer, so to accommodate that, I used the oktava 219-PE, run through a tube preamplifier, close-mic’ed. For the violin, a pair of small-diaphragm condensers were suspended over the violinist in an XY stereo configuration. The Mridangam received a pair of SM57’s direct-micing the heads of the instrument. A rode NT2 in omni mode was used to capture the room sound. An electronic tambura was patched directly into the board, and then fed to small monitors for musician reference.

Because of the constant push and pull of tempo, there was little use for either a metronome or bar counts, so most overdubbing had to be done by “feel” – playing parts multiple time then doing crossfades at opportune moments. The difficult parts came from the close-micing of both the sax and the mridangam – the sax, in that the microphone picked up the noise from the keys, and the drum in that it was direct-mic’ed so it lacked some of the more natural sound built up over distance. The latter was rectified with some judicious stereo panning of the individual tracks and the carefula djustment of reverb predelay to make it sound more natural in the mix. The former problem was somewhat (although not completely) reduced by mixing in the room mic signal.

Mastering presented a special set of challenges. As this was a classical recording, preservation of dynamic range was paramount. However, there was a natural need for loudness and the “glue” of buss compression as well, so the two requirements had to be carefully balanced. Large amounts of fader automation was required to tame some peaky passages, essentially performing manual signal compression without the sonic artifacting that usually implies. The whole album was then gently compressed and the gain increased by a few decibels to increase the overall saturation and signal strength without obliterating the high dynamic range of the pieces.