sound wires Archives - Aaron J. Trumm

6 Tips for Audio Mixing on the Go

This article about audio mixing on the go first appeared in FlyPaper by Soundfly. I reprint it here with permission and I encourage you to check out their courses. You can get a 15% discount code on a subscription using the promo code AJTRUMM15.

Also – you may find an affiliate link here and there and I may get commissions – it’s part of how I keep afloat!

Let’s not beat around the bush. You probably got stuck at home for a long time due to the virus which shall remain nameless. So maybe “on the go” is an ironic thing to say, but the concept of mixing outside of the normal studio setting is what we’re talking about here.

You can use some of these tips to help you get quality mixes while you’re stuck at home, and even if your actual studio is at home, and in an open world you can take them out to all the coffee shops, park benches, and hotel rooms your heart desires.

So, without further ado – let’s talk about six tips for mixing on the go.

Listen More Ways

The fact is if you’re doing this audio mixing on the go thing, you’re probably doing so in headphones. If not headphones, you’re listening in rooms that aren’t treated well. If you’re at home, you could start treating the room you’re in, but if you don’t want to go down a home studio rabbit hole, or if you’re actually out in the world, consider various listening devices.

Try listening to mixes on your main headphones, then your laptop speakers, then a set of earbuds. Try exporting the mix to an mp3 and listening with your phone. Or connect an old boom box with aux input. Listen on your TV. Listen in your car. Take notes everywhere you listen so you can make adjustments.

Believe it or not this was common practice even back when everything was mixed in big fancy commercial studios.

Small Tweaks

When you make adjustments from listening to various speakers and devices, make them subtle. If you hear too much hat on the laptop but it sounds fine in the headphones, pull it down a bit so it starts to sound better on the laptop but doesn’t get lost in the headphones.

Remember the name of the game is having mixes translate on various devices, so making subtle tweaks is usually best. It’s also better in general when you’re not in the best circumstances to make small tweaks.

Develop Over Time

Since you have a DAW and you can save mixes, and even save alternate mixes, you don’t have to do it all at once. You can use this to your advantage to let a song develop over time, rather than trying to get it all right in one go.

This evolution of a mix over time is sometimes the best way to get past the limitation of being in less than ideal mixing environment.

Get Feedback

Since you do have the luxury of letting a mix develop over time, take advantage of other people’s listening environments (and ears!) by getting feedback. Take notes and try to make subtle adjustments based on what other people hear. Usually, you can implement everything everyone says in a subtle way and strengthen your mix over the course of a little time.

These people don’t have to be experts either. A healthy mix of expert ears and lay-listeners can really give you the best bead on how your sound is landing.

Use Reference Tracks

Starting off a mix session by listening to a view great mixes that are in the ballpark of the sound you want is always a good idea, but it’s especially necessary when you’re in unfamiliar territory. You still won’t be able to hear sub bass your headphones can’t reproduce or shimmering highs missing in your temporary speakers, but you will be able to calibrate your listening so you can more quickly get to the sound you’re looking for.

Come back to your references periodically, especially if you’re in headphones, to keep your perspective right.

Corrective Software

Finally, you may be able to improve your ability to mix remotely with the use of corrective software such as SonarWorks. Although not the only game in town, SonarWorks is the best at calibrating headphones so that you can get a reasonable even, reliable sound to mix with. Other calibration packages include IK Multimedia’s ARC, ToneBoosters, Dirac, and Waves NX. All these packages are simply filters you insert between your master buss and audio output, which eq the sound according to a headphone or room profile, evening out the sound for a more accurate mix. You may be surprised at how game changing this can be. (By the way, you could probably use some room correction in your space too – check my video on how I do this for – basically – free).

Go Forth – Or Stay Home

Whether you’re languishing in a house with no studio, or you’re living in the post COVID utopia of travel and socialization, you can get a great mix on the go with your laptop, DAW, and a little bit of tenacity and inventiveness. And you can always check your mixes later at the real studio to see how well you did. Using some of the tips here, we hope you’re pleasantly surprised!

I’m an artist, producer, and writer. I used to mix all over the place. Now I stay more put. Let’s talk about it on Facebook or Instagram

5 Creative Ways to Use Delay in a Mix

This article about creative ways to use delay first appeared in FlyPaper by Soundfly. I reprint it here with permission and I encourage you to check out their courses. You can get a 15% discount code on a subscription using the promo code AJTRUMM15.

Also – you may find an affiliate link here and there – it’s part of how I keep afloat!

Delay is one of those staple effects. No DAW is without at least one delay plugin, and most mixes utilize this bread-and-butter effect in some way. Not to mention, hardware delays are a lot of fun too. There’s a good chance you’re using it regularly, perhaps to create a repeating effect, make a ping-pong happen, or any number of creative things. There are, in fact, a whole host of useful things you can do with a delay, so we thought we’d go over five creative ways to use delay in a mix.

Create and change rhythms

One beautiful use of delay is to create or change rhythm tracks. You can take an otherwise boring drum beat, say boom bap boom boom bap, and make it swing and sway, turn it into a whole different thing, or just make the snare do a few interesting flims and flams. Try sending both kick and snare through a tempo delay set at factor one half (8^th notes). This will turn boom bapp into Boom(boom) Bap(boomBi) Boom(boomboom) Bap (boom Bi). Adjust the wet dry mix to emphasize or deemphasize the original rhythm and use decay time to adjust how long the new delayed rhythm plays out.

Or try using a stereo delay that’s locked to your project tempo. Set one side to factor three quarters and the other to one half. You can use feedback to mess with the rhythm further, and if your delay has a crossfeed setting, you could even automate that to come up at certain times to create variance in the pattern and pseudo fills. You could even combine feedback and crossfeed to create crescendos. Use your imagination, try a whole bunch of different things, and you can create a ton of rhythms you wouldn’t have thought of.

Use delay instead of reverb

To get quite technical, reverb is simply a kind of delay. You can set your delay to basically give you reverb, or even better, use delay instead of reverb to create space without washing out the sound. For example, here’s a trick that adds depth and presence to a vocal track:

Send the vocal to a buss and insert a tempo-locked stereo delay. Set one side to a 16^th note and the other to a 16^th dotted or triplet. Set the feedback to something low like 7% on the left and 9% on the right, so that you get one or two repeats. Bring the buss up until you have what you want. You can use this effect instead of a reverb, or in combination with one. It works as an in-your-face effect in some mixes, and sometimes it’s appropriate to use it subtly, like something you only notice when it’s gone.

Make a mono track stereo

If you’ve got a mono track, perhaps a synth or guitar and you want it to be stereo, you can use a delay to do this. Just copy the signal to another track and pan each copy hard left/right. Then insert a delay on one side and set it somewhere between 5 and 20ms. Make sure the wet/dry is set to 100% wet, with no feedback or crossfeed (unless you want to see what happens!).

Alternatively, use three tracks with the original in the center. Insert a separate delay on both left and right with a similar setting, say 5 to 20ms on the left and 10 to 30ms on the right, making sure they’re different. Bring the two sides down or up to taste to create your new stereo track.

Create a metallic effect

If you set your delay to a very fast response, say around 15ms, and set feedback to a generous setting, say around 50%, what you’ll get is a very metallic effect, akin to some kind of robot sound. This effect is enhanced by a high pass filter cutting out low frequencies.

Play with the feedback and crossfeed settings to create more metal effect or decrease the delay time even further to inch toward a flange-like sound.

Delay the delay

Finally, there’s no rule against combining delays. To put some of the previous examples together, I created a simple pattern with kick and snare. Next, I inserted a delay and set the delay time to around 17ms, with a feedback of 40% and a wet/dry mix of 44%. Then I inserted a stereo delay, this one tempo locked, and set the left side delay time to factor one half (8^th notes) and the left to three quarters. I set the feedback at 26% and the wet/dry mix to 34%.

That was cool enough, but the fun part was automating the crossfeed setting in time with the rhythm. On the metallic delay, bringing the crossfeed to around 50% at the last beat of the measure created a kind of synth accompaniment, and jamming it all the way to 100% created basically a wobble bass, as the low end from the kick modulated, then interacted with the second delay. Next, I tried automating the crossfeed on the second delay, which created fills and variations in both the drum track and the new pseudo synth.

All of this coming out of only one drum patch, with a simple kick and snare pattern.

Put it into practice

If there’s one thing that comes up over and over in audio, music and mixing, it’s that there are no rules. You can find creative ways to use delay any way you see fit, and it’s a great idea to experiment. Play with settings, break the rules, and find your next crazy, interesting, beautiful sound.

I’m an artist, producer, and writer. I’m very punctual, even though I love delay. Let me know your creative delay tricks on Facebook or Instagram

Everything You Need to Know About Picking Audio Cables

September 21, 2022 by Aaron

Audio Instruction, Flypaper by Soundfly, Instructional Stuff, Published Work

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, audio cables, flypaper, home recording, music business, nquit music, professional audio, professional music, recording, sound wires, soundfly

This article first appeared in FlyPaper by Soundfly. I reprint it here with permission (and I also stole their pictures of connectors – I hope they can forgive me!), and I encourage you to check out their courses. You can get a 15% discount code on a subscription using the promo code AJTRUMM15.

Unfortunately, you can’t connect audio gear with brainwaves yet – or even wifi (with notable exceptions). So, even in the modern world of digital awesomeness, cabling is still the heart of a studio and a stage, and something you should take seriously.

Here is everything you need to know about picking out cables – which isn’t as much as you may fear (what you could know – that’s a longer story).

Balanced vs. unbalanced

First you need to know the difference between balanced signal and unbalanced signal.

Balanced signal uses three wires – ground, positive, and negative. Plus and minus carry the same information with opposite polarity. Balanced devices receive signal and flip one side’s polarity, bringing them back into phase – which happens to put noise out of phase with itself – cancelling it out. Sound like Greek? The key takeaway: Balanced connections reject noise.
Unbalanced signal uses – you guessed it – only two wires. Simpler, cheaper, and noisier.

Unbalanced cables may work in short runs (under 25 feet – under 6 if you’re naughty), and some gear is unbalanced. If all your gear is unbalanced, using balanced cables won’t help you much, though it won’t hurt either. If your gear is balanced, you’re better off using balanced cables all around if you can afford it.

Older gear like vintage outboard gear, anything with RCA type connectors like record players, and instruments such as guitars and basses are all unbalanced.

Microphones, mic preamps, and mixers are normally balanced. Again, pick balanced cables unless money is an issue, the runs are short, and/or every single piece of gear is unbalanced (unlikely).

Speaker vs. instrument

If you’ve skipped ahead, you’ve noticed that you can tell a balanced cable from an instrument cable by looking at the connector. Unfortunately, that’s not so with speaker cables vs. instrument (aka guitar) cables.

Nevertheless, it matters. Speaker cables are unshielded, which means if you grab one to connect your guitar to your amp, you’ll pick up noise from other sources (the “Mexican radio” problem), interference from devices – and generally have a noisy, ugly result.

It’s even worse in reverse. Using an instrument cable on a speaker such as a powered monitor or separate amp/loudspeaker can cause major-league harm to your amp. Because instrument cables have smaller wire, you’ll be sending a high amount of current to your amp – way more than it can actually handle. Things may be fine at first, but eventually you could cause a short in the amp, melt the cable, or worse yet – look stupid.

So how do you tell the difference? Read the package and keep track.

Connectors

Here’s a run down of typical audio connectors. Pro tip: if you can tell the difference between the first two, you’ll know if a cable is balanced or not by looking at the connector.

TS

TS stands for tip/sleeve. Think of a guitar cable or a speaker cable (see above if you skipped ahead). Also known as quarter-inch mono or phone jack. Notice there are two terminals. The tip (literally) and the sleeve (below the little line). That’s two channels. Three guesses whether this is a balanced or unbalanced connector, and the first two don’t count. (Hint: Unbalanced.)

TRS

TRS stands for tip/ring/sleeve. AKA quarter-inch stereo or quarter-inch balanced. Notice the extra little line in the connector, creating a tip (literally!), ring (the middle part), and sleeve (as before). TRS connectors are – you guessed it – balanced. Or they can be stereo. Why? Because they have two discreet channels – so they could carry stereo information instead of balanced mono information. Take a look at your headphone connector and you’ll see a tip/ring/sleeve connector. This signal is split into two before it gets to each side of the headphones.

You’ll also see TRS connectors on one end of insert cables. In this case, the signal is split into two not for stereo purposes, but for output and return.

Mini TRS

1/8^th inch tip/ring/sleeve connectors are used for earbuds, many y-cables that you would use to connect your laptop’s headphone outputs to a mixer, and some headphones. Look for the three terminals on the connector – if you only see tip and sleeve, it’s not a stereo connector.

XLR

Mic cables. Old-school blokes call them cannon connectors. Unlike other types of cables, XLR cables are male on one end and female on the other. This is handy. Output is male (you know why). Input is female. Notice the three pins. XLR connections are balanced. Mics and mic pres aren’t the only place you’ll see them. They’re also used in AES/EBU digital cables (although the cable itself is a bit different), and you may come across an XLR patch bay.

RCA

Also called phono connectors. These are unbalanced. You’ll see the female side on mixers labelled “tape in/out”, on the back of consumer electronics such as TVs and video game consoles, and interestingly – as S/PDIF digital inputs on audio gear. Technically, S/PDIF cables are more robust, and it’s better to opt for a true S/PDIF cable for these connections, but a regular old RCA cable will do in a pinch. RCA connectors are also typical in the y-cables mentioned above.

Other types

There are of course many other types of connectors you’ll see less often. These include but are not limited to banana plugs (speaker/amp systems), speakON (stage monitors and pro PA stuff), BNC (word clock and video connections), optical (digital audio), DB25 (computer-like connections with multiple channels in a small space), Elco (similar idea to DB25), and tiny telephone or “bantam” (miniature TRS connectors typical for large studio patch bays – very space-saving).

That’s it. In fact, that may be more than you actually need to know. You’ll notice we didn’t talk about Monster cables and Mogami cables and gold lamé cables and thousand dollar per foot custom-made cables from Japan. All those things may be great, and they may float your boat, but for the most part, any solidly made cable will do the job – as long as you pay attention to balanced vs. unbalanced and speaker vs. instrument cables – and your connections.

Until telepathic wi-fi enabled audio is invented, we hope this helps.

I’m a producer, writer and artist. I’m not always spacey, but when I am, I prefer lush and classy reverb – sometimes. Let me know your favorite reverbs on Facebook or Instagram

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