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Monthly Archives: August 2021

Art vs. Science in Mixing – and Life?

August 31, 2021 by Aaron
Audio Instruction, Instructional Stuff, Music Thoughts, Rants, Randomness, Published Work, Recording Magazine
aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, acoustics, do it yourself recording, home recording, mixing, music mixing, nquit music, professional audio, professional music, recording, recording magazine, rob chiarelli

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

If you haven’t read a book called “Zen and the Art of Mixing”, stop now, order it, and then continue reading this.

Now that you’ve done that, I’ll tell you a story. One day not long ago I was sitting in a plush lecture hall in the Westin hotel in Los Angeles, listening to a workshop on mixing by Rob Chiarelli. If you don’t already know, Rob is a Grammy winning producer and mixer, known for working with such acts as Will Smith, Christina Aguilera, Pink, LeAnn Rimes, Janet Jackson, Stevie Wonder…and on and on and on.

Needless to say, we were all excited to hear what Rob had to say, and there were many enthusiastic mixers ready with a host of questions. As you might imagine, some of those questions were quite technical, and I remember early on somebody in the back asked something I thought of as – well – a little nit-picky. LUFS on pre-master mix buss, or something along those lines. Something that although I have the capacity to understand, would never have crossed my mind to ask, in 25 years of making records. Naturally I felt stupid.

I was prepared for embarrassment, feeling sure that Rob would pontificate in great detail on the proper way to handle whatever it was, but was pleasantly surprised when Rob scoffed. I don’t want to say he called it a stupid question (he was very magnanimous) – but kinda.

Rob’s answer was basically this: does it sound good? Does it feel good? He did talk for some time in response to that question, but the lecture was about what matters in a mix, and that’s the song. If the thing feels great, it feels great. If it sounds great, it sounds great, and if you get so caught up in the technical mumbo-jumbo and fail to pay attention to the feel of the mix, you’ll probably mess it up.

That was a great relief, but in the next few minutes, Rob did talk about some very technical points, and he did end up addressing the question in some detail. What struck me was the deep understanding he had about the science of audio, as well as the overall goal. Here was a guy who has a grasp of the balance between art and science. He hadn’t scoffed at this question because he was stumped. Not at all.

It seems this is a pretty fitting analogy for life in general. We need to understand the details, and science has the been the way we’ve achieved most of what we take for granted now. It was a physicist (Loud Tommy Dowd) who gave us multi-track recording and the fader. An electrical engineer (Max Mathews) brought us digital audio. But when we get caught in the details and forget the reason for them, we risk losing the art entirely.

We’re seeing that battle a lot lately, not just in music. Science is being thrown away when it shouldn’t be, but so is its counterpart, faith. This is a dilemma as old as history. In college lectures on medieval history, we called it the battle of faith vs. reason. In every era one trumps the other and there are always consequences.

Perhaps this is what’s so magical about music and mixing. You really can’t get it right without both. Fail to understand the science and you’re left guessing, bumbling, and making mixes that sound like cats fighting or elephants dying. Skip the crucial details and you could find yourself overloading a speaker, losing a job, or recording silence at a once in lifetime performance.

Still, if you can’t step back and feel the music, let it tell you what it needs, and worry less about technical terms, peak meters and the next fancy plugin, you could end up making cold, dreary mixes that move no one. In fact, too much emphasis on the technical and you could end up with the same muddy, screechy mix as your head-in-the-clouds counterpart.

There are two abilities that set great mixers apart from mediocre ones. One is the ability to hear details – pick out the high-hat and hear that slight 3k resonance or hear the kick phasing just slightly with the bass. The other is to turn that type of listening off and hear the big picture. Listen to the way the mix grooves as a whole unit. Turn off the brain, notice the goosebumps, and feel your head nodding. The ability to be both analytical and emotional – sometimes simultaneously – is what makes a mixer truly amazing. It may even be what music is for.

It’s hard to be two opposite things at once, or at least we’re led to believe that. But I think in mixing, as in life, the great goal is balance. I think and I feel, therefore I am a musician.

So, if you ask me whether art or science is king in mixing, I’d say they share the throne. Whichever side you tend to lean toward, I encourage you to lean the other way sometimes. See what you can find by valuing both. Maybe you’ll be able to mix art and science a little better (pun fully intended). Either way, keep doing what you do.

—–

I’m always trying to learn more about balance, art, science and sound. If you want talk about it with me, find me on Facebook @AaronJTrumm

Favorite DAW? PShaw!

August 24, 2021 by Aaron
Instructional Stuff, Music Thoughts, Rants, Randomness, Published Work, Recording Magazine
aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, acoustics, best DAW, DAWs, digital audio workstation, do it yourself recording, favorite DAW, home recording, nquit music, professional audio, professional music, recording, recording magazine

Why choose only one?

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

A long time ago, in a studio far far away, there were many people involved in a song production, and the process included separate, distinct parts, each role played by a professional specialist. There was tracking, done in a tracking studio by tracking engineers. There was mixing, done in a mix studio by a mix engineer. And there was the dark and mysterious process of mastering, done in a mastering studio by a golden eared audio god immersed in single-minded technicality.

Now? Not so much. Yes, the traditional process still happens, but more and more it’s all one big jumble, especially for those of us producing track after track on tight budgets.

Of course, what has made this possible is computing. Gone (mostly) are megalith tape machines, and in their place the all-powerful DAW – digital audio workstation. Everyone has their favorite. Some people hate all the others. Debates are waged. Articles are written. “How To Choose The Right DAW For You”. “Which DAW is best?” If it weren’t for the loudness wars, the sample rate wars, and the regular ol’ guns and ammo wars, the DAW wars might rage uncontrollably.

But what would it be like if the world of the DAW was all kumbaya and lovey-dovey? What if you didn’t have to choose just one? What if all DAWs had their place in a wonderful world of DAW inclusion?

Or at least what if you, as an all-in-one production team, realized there may be a reason to use more than one. If you think of audio as audio, and not as DAW projects stuck inside a particular format, there’s a whole world of possibility for improving workflow, sound, and creativity.

There are a few reasons for this. One may be obvious – certain DAWs are better suited to certain tasks than others. More than that, certain software may be better suited to your way of doing that task than others. Some DAWs have certain built-in functionality, or a unique sound, and yet don’t work well in other ways (for you). Certain DAWs may not run a favorite plugin or two, or embed video the way you like, or warp audio in a way that makes sense to you.

An argument can be made for warping yourself instead, learning how to most powerfully use your DAW’s features, and that’s definitely a good idea. Still, it’s nice to know there may be other options.

Another fabulous reason to use different software for different parts of the project goes back to the traditional way of doing things. If you’re a one-person production crew, it’s very helpful if you can get yourself in a different mindset for each part of the process. Exporting audio and changing software can go a long way toward that goal.

Indeed, that can be inefficient, but it can be super helpful.

That’s not all though. You may find yourself collaborating with people outside of your studio, and those people may not be using the same software. Wouldn’t it be nice if you were the genius who could handle multiple formats, change back and forth, work within someone else’s flow, and make everything come together?

And of course, having a working knowledge of multiple DAWs is quite helpful when you travel to a session at another studio and your preferred software isn’t available. Perhaps you’re a Cubase lover, but you don’t have a grand piano, and you’ve been granted access to a ProTools studio with a beautimous grand. You’re given the run of the place – as long as you can pilot the ship yourself. It might be nice to be competent with ProTools – and know how to bring the project back into Cubase.

It can be costly to run multiple platforms, admittedly. Although some very good software is free, and other packages are affordable enough that you could replace one you can’t afford with three you can. So multiple packages may be the way to go if your budget is extra tight. Or it may simply be the cost of doing business to maintain a wide array of options. It all depends on your situation.

Speaking of which, everyone’s flow is different, so we all have our quirky little setups. I’ll leave you with mine, just to give you an idea how things might come together.

  • Tracking: Cakewalk by BandLab. Or ProTools if piloting the aforementioned piano studio.
  • Editing: Cakewalk. I can’t wrap my head around ProTools editing, even after 25 years.
  • Voiceover editing: Audacity.
  • Loop based composition, warping, and live triggering: Ableton.
  • Mixing: Cakewalk, and then MixBus for final tweaks and that special MixBus sound.
  • Mastering: Reaper, because it seems to deal with my preferred plugins best.
  • MP3 Conversion: Sox, a command line tool. I wrote a script which uses Sox to make every deliverable I need in one fell swoop.

Yes, everything I do can be done in any one of the packages I use. But I find it freeing to move smoothly from one to another. Maybe you could too!

I work with Cakewalk, Ableton, Reaper, MixBus – and ok sometimes ProTools. We can argue about it on social media @AaronJTrumm.

It’s All About The Room

August 11, 2021 by Aaron
Acoustics, Instructional Stuff, Music Thoughts, Rants, Randomness, Published Work, Recording Magazine
aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, acoustic treatment, acoustics, do it yourself recording, home recording, home studio acoustics, nquit music, professional audio, professional music, recording, recording magazine, recording studio acoustics

Why acoustic treatment should be your first expense

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

Being the adventurous, un-monied, and fairly non-famous soul that I am, I’ve been in a ton of low-end recording studios. Project studios, home studios, studios in strip malls, studios in cottages behind houses. I’ve visited rehearsal studios in Houston suburbs, band garages in Austin slums, electronica dens in Albuquerque, and video production suites in Oakland. I’ve also been in my fair share of commercial studios. And of course, I’ve built out countless bedroom studios of my own over the course of a 26-year career. Some were pretty bad, I admit.

That’s not to mention all the studio pictures I’ve seen and remote collaborations on Skype and Zoom. I’ve seen enough studio desks to last me a lifetime, and almost daily I see an image of some slick piece of gear I wish I had. Video monitors, big bad computers, control surfaces, pre-amps, mics, you name it.

It turns out that almost without fail, you can a tell a professional by the studio they keep – and it looks quite different than some might expect. You can also predict with reasonable accuracy how a recordist’s work will sound by looking around their room.

Given the topic of this issue, you may not be surprised to hear me say, it’s not the $50,000 Pro Tools rigs or high-end monitor switchers that make the difference. It’s not even the expensive preamps or vintage microphones (although those things don’t hurt).

What it comes down to is the room. Capturing audio is all about the space of course, but especially when it comes to mixing – we all know what a poorly responding room can do to a mix. So, it’s a harbinger of bad things to come when I walk into a studio that boasts $100,000 worth of shiny new equipment placed haphazardly in a hard square box.

Why does this happen? Who knows? Perhaps we gravitate toward the prestigious. Perhaps we need to be able to boast about our equipment to draw in clients. Perhaps we think acoustic treatment is only for top-tier, multi-million-dollar facilities. Maybe people just don’t know why or how to properly prepare a room for audio.

Whatever it is, that’s why we at Recording Magazine dedicate an entire month to monitoring and acoustics. And perhaps this issue should have come out in January, because your listening and recording environments should be the first thing you deal with.

Especially if you’re revamping or building a new studio, rather than spending as much money as possible on your recording computer, microphones, plugins, software, keyboards, and so on, start your spending (and your building) with the room.

Don’t be afraid of running out of money. With some ingenuity you can properly treat a standard bedroom for not much more than the cost of a Rode Condenser – if that. And you can make it look good too! Remember, you don’t need to build a million-dollar facility with 30-foot ceilings, non-parallel surfaces, and outer walls full of sand.

And here’s a tip: Although every room tests out a bit differently, the solutions are pretty much always the same. So, you can finish 90% of your treatment before you even pick out a pair of monitors. In fact, that’s what I’d recommend. Treat the room and make it sound great on its own before you even bring in the furniture. Then get some great monitors, bring them and the other gear in, and listen. Then, if you’re so inclined you can test the room and make tweaks.

It won’t take as much time as you may think, and it won’t cost as much as you may be afraid of. Make the quality of the space your first priority with monitors a close second and you’ll be working with a foundation that’s far better than most other studios.

It really is all about the room!

I work in a small, well treated room. I talk about acoustics quite a bit. I think about acoustics quite a bit. We can talk about acoustics a bit on Facebook if you want, @AaronJTrumm.

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