One of my clients called me last week to follow up on some audio production work I had done for them. It was the recording engineer who called on this occasion. It seems he produced a piece of audio recently that his manager compared to work I had done then suggested he find out my audio secret sauce in making their productions sound warm and full.
Based on the conversation, I came up with three ingredients to my audio secret sauce.
1) GOOD EQUIPMENT
Not everyone has the budget of my client and can stock up on good quality microphones (I believe my client uses Hiel mics), preamps, mixing boards and recording hardware. Get the best equipment your budget can afford.
I highly recommend establishing a good relationship with a local store and make arrangements to try their equipment out, renting or borrowing equipment is that’s an option or having a decent amount of time to try it out in the store. Before making my decision to buy an Electrovoice RE-20 microphone a few years ago, my contact at a local store sent me home with five expensive microphones (almost $3500 worth) to try in my home studio and on my recording equipment.
It’s not only the microphone that makes a difference. You also need to consider the cabling ($10 dollar, 25 foot cables give $10, 25 foot sound) and the sound board and/or sound card you’re plugging your microphone into. Everything in the input chain affects the quality of the input signal you’re recording.
The same goes for your portable recording setup. Buy the portable audio recorder that offers you the best quality for your budget, not the one that you think looks cool. If you have the money, invest in a decent handheld microphone (and cable) to use with your portable recorder.
2) ‘LESS IS MORE’
This rule applies throughout the recording, editing and mixing stages of audio production and is a lesson I learned many years ago from Mark Blacher, owner of the long lost DB Recording Systems.
To start, you want to do as little input-processing as possible. In the case of my client, I know the engineer only does a little bit of equalizing to account for the room in which they record. Aside from that, I recommend doing nothing more than a little bit of limiting to prevent clipping. Limiting is done using an effects processor called (appropriately enough) a limiter to prevent music or the person speaking from being so loud that it negatively affects the recording.
My client’s engineer does a fantastic job with the recording and I’ve told him as much, encouraging him to not change anything (more on this later). His recordings are clean and warm. That’s easy to work with in post production. As Mark Blacher used to say (and probably still does), “you can’t make a bad recording sound good, you can only make it sound less bad.”
Signal processing is where people tend to make the biggest mistakes. Whether its equalizers, compressors/limiters, noise filter and gates, reverbs, delays or maximizers, the trend is to add elements without listening to how each adjustment affects the whole. The goal of using effects is generally to make all of the pieces fit together in the final mix. Of course, this is different if the goal is to be wild, crazy or a little more artistic/avante-garde.
In the spoken word and corporate audio production work I do, I use only the effects that actually add something meaningful to the mix. Then, another lesson from Mark Blacher, I add as much as it takes to audibly notice the effect over the mix, then back it off so it’s part of the mix.
To help with the understanding, let’s explore a few scenarios.
VOICEOVER WITH MUSIC: Here, we want the voice to stand out over the music and have both be elements of the mix without competing for attention. A rookie mistake is to focus strictly on bringing the music down in the mix (or worse, bring the voice up) so the voiceover stands out. The danger here is that the music gets pulled back too much and the mix loses a lot of the energy it needs from the relationship of the music and voice, together. I try to use both levels and equalization to pull the music back enough. With a little experimentation, I use the equalizer to find the dominant frequencies shared by both music and voice (voice being the primary user of those frequencies) and then pull those frequencies back from the music (depending on the music, anywhere between -3db and -12db). The goal is to carve out a space for the voice and music to co-exist.
In fact, when it comes to less is more, a supplement to that is take away before you add. This is particularly true when it comes to mixing. You’ll get far better results turning the loud things down than turning the quiet things up. And, your listener will appreciate your efforts much more (even if they don’t know it).
EVEN-ING THE ODD LEVELS: It’s not uncommon to have variances in the volume between recorded voices. There are a lot of tricks to getting the levels evened out, the most common one is to use a compressor. Compressors work kind of like a vice on a workbench (and many people use it that way), pressing everything together to hold it in one spot. In the audio world, this means that every sound below a certain audible level is amplified to that minimum, and every sound above a certain audible level is decreased to that maximum. The mistake people make is to trust the compressor to do its job without listening to the result. Common results are audio that has no dynamics (everything from a whisper to an explosion ends up being the same volume) and that there is an audible event of amplifying weak signals and crushing strong ones (think of how your ears feel after coming out of a loud concert). Telltale signs of improper use of a compressor is that ambient sounds like appliances, electronics and air movement end up taking residence in the mix. This is bad. Very bad! Where possible, do as much level tweaking using your level faders. Use compression only to bring things a little closer to each other. Moderate discrepancies in the levels are far better than overuse of compression.
ADDING SOME ENERGY: This is more of a technique used in recording music, though there are applications for corporate voiceover work, as well. I’m talking about using reverbs and, to a lesser extent, delays to add depth and energy to a voice. This is not something I generally recommend, by the way. However, if you must try it, I stand by the mantra of ‘less is more’. In fact, done well, most people won’t even notice the reverb at all. I remember when Mark Blacher introduced me to this approach of reverb use, I was irate that I was paying him to add reverb to the mix and I couldn’t hear it. Then, he muted the reverb and the song suddenly sounded empty and thin. Delays add an echo which, for obvious reasons, will be indentifiable in the mix. The real trick is to make sure the delay doesn’t become overly dominant.
NOISE FILTERS AND GATES: My best advice… get good foreground sound as far away as undesirable noises (such as refrigerators, fans, hums, etc…). Noise filters and gates introduce a lot of challenges and can really mess up a recording. The same goes for auto-ducking. Stay away! If you really must use these effects, see ingredient #3.
3) PLAY
The only way to know how to use the various dials, switches, faders, pans, pots, cables, blinky lights and especially your ears is to play with your equipment and as many different recordings as you can. Take advantage of quiet time and hobby projects to figure out how things work, how to make some things sound like hell and how to make others sound great.
There’s a million different ways to make good chilli and your job as the audio engineer and producer is to figure out which ingredients go best together, in which quantities and sequence, and how the result should sit in the bowl (and which bowl to use, for that matter). Then, figure out how to do things entirely differently.
With play comes fun and real experience.
THE NOT-SO-SECRET INGREDIENT
During our phone conversation, it became apparent that my client had ended up with processor creep (including a loudness maximizer). In an attempt to develop a sound they liked, they had moved so far away from the great source recording that there was a real disconnect between the original performance and the resulting audio.
When asked which processors I was using and how I was using them to get the great sound, I double checked and confirmed I was using only a little bit of subtractive equalization and nothing else; no compressors, no reverbs, no maximizers. The warm and full sound of the final product I produced came almost entirely from the skill and technique of the recording engineer (and the great equipment he’s using).
If I had to identify the one ingredient in audio secret sauce that makes a great product, it’s this… use your ears. Listen. Really. Carefully. Listen to the individual elements and (more importantly) how they all fit together. Everything you hear must make sense to your ears.
