And by “work” I mean that the mixes I have made following the LMAs installation have been probably the most well balanced thus far. It is a truly reassuring feeling to know that my mix skills don’t utterly suck; and that with the aid of decent room acoustics I’m able to muster a listenable mix.

I attribute the recent good mixes to the following:
1. Room correction through combination of LMAs working in the low frequencies, broadband porous absorbers working in the low-mids up to high-mids, and 20 band parametric digital EQ in the main monitor path with the B&K room target response (low shelf below 100 Hz replaced with slope) as the target.
2. BootEQmkII vst plugin for smooth signal shaping on most project tracks. The plugin has a beautiful colour and depth, ultra smooth EQ, and very useful tube emulation stage. This plug, in addition to convolution reverb have been the two most useful plugs.

The mix room still has noticable high frequency slap echo; some extra mid to high frequency diffusion would be a very welcome addition to the room,say some 2D QRDs or PRDs. On the lookout for an off-the-shelf fix here, as opposed to the DIY LMAs and porous absorbers.

So now looking for some more music projects to work on.

Throw an enquiry my way if you are interested to send your project for a mix.

Well, its almost one year since my previous post. I’m not sure this new post is due to the sudden emergence of a warm Sydney spring, or a rekindling of my audio recording and production inner flame. I suspect the latter, but I wouldn’t turn away the warm breeze either.

So what has been happening during the last 12 months?

After a long cold Sydney autumn and winter with little progress on musical efforts (probably more on this in a later blog), a recording and production project for Les Violettes was offered to me, which I gratefully accepted. Consisting of voice, piano, flute and melodica, recording and dubbing of four songs occurred over two nights at the Con. Pianist and vocalist were positioned in the same (small) room so the vocalist could feel the piano; piano to vocal mic leakage was significant though.

Mixing for these tracks is ongoing. It has been a challenge to get a rich and balanced sound from the upright piano recording (the piano was a bit out of tune and boxy sounding) and the vocals had a bit of nasal and upper frequency distortion (the latter I think due to poor quality Saffire Pro preamps available in the studio, and the former a combination of room response and mic honk). EQ has been used to good effect.

I experimented with reverb and delay in the mix. Dynamic EQ was used to tame obtrusive piano resonances.

Onto the live recordings: Hey Big Aki and The Wrecking Room were captured last Friday. With insufficient cabling for a proper multitrack recording, two audience mics and 2 mono PA mixes from the desk were recorded. With a bit of mix/mastering twiddling, the HBA recording / production sounds quite good – thanks Jack for the good PA mix.

The Wrecking Room show was also handled and handed over to the band – still pending their review. Here’s hoping for a good one. Their show was super impressive; wall of sound arrangements, male-female vocal harmonies, and a healthy dose of feel good stage presence and banter.

The next day, a trip to record Les Violettes in Leichhardt live. No amplification, so a stereo-pair mic, in X-Y configuration, was setup about 3 feet from the vocalist, 5 feet from the flautist, and 8 feet from the grand piano. The show was a real pleasure. Great renditions of their original pieces and classic French song interpretations.  With some minor mixing (panning only) and mastering twiddling, a nice sounding recording was handed over with a good response. 2 out of 2 so far.

Last Wednesday saw the 3rd show in the series; the Gaelic with Elle Kennard and Beaufields. In contrast to the previous shows, I received quite poor audio submixes from the desk and equally nasty sounds from the audience mics. I attempted to salvage some of the performance; a beautiful vox/piano solo song, The Rippling, was mixed (vox channel, stereo “band” and 2 x audience mics), albeit with high noise floor from the “band” channel. The live sound engineer had to scramble for acceptable sound as only half of the PA system was operating. With Elle as the 3rd act, the sound engineer had put together a good sound considering, but for reasons not well understood, the captures onto disk were a bit nasty. Was the PA mix heavily compromised to work with the available PA system? Was the PA eq’d in a nasty way and required channel EQ to compensate? Maybe the submixes received (I recorded 8 channels which included 2 x band, 2 x audience mics, 2 x drums (unusual channel separation, and no overhead mics), 2 x vocals) were a bit skewed on top of the PA mix. Anywho, the mix result was pretty poor, and is abandoned for the foreseeable future.

All in all, good fun capturing the live performances. A good experience mixing/mastering them too.

As a positive, the residence is double brick so this provides some protection.

Window cavities are poorly sealed (rotten wooden window sliders); gas vent (6 in main living area) along with two small windows provide more openings for nasty sounds.

The front door is also a fairly poor acoustic seal, and lets through much of the disturbance from the down-stairs refrigeration noise generator.

Oh, and not to mention proximity to an international airport and situation in the flight path.

The above culminating in a quite poor place for working on audio, wouldn’t you say?

Besides sound isolation concerns, of which the above show that there are many, the quality of the internal acoustics (room reflections, modes) have been a cause of concern too. The plots show the room’s (and to a much less/insignificant extent the monitor’s and measurement microphone’s response) frequency response. The sound source was band-limited to above about 50 Hz. The following refers to the right channel measurement: there is an alarming local minimum of -18 dB at 83 Hz, which makes mixing bass and drums extremely difficult over the loudspeakers. We also see a -8dB dip at 143 Hz, and overall a very uneven response all the way up the audible range, including a big dip at 2.5 kHz, and high eq shelf attenuation and troughs above 5 kHz. Overall, a very uneven mixing environment, and one in which you would expect to have a difficult time creating translatable mixes.

So the quest now is to build broadband bass traps to tame this difficult internal environment. Purchasing these from retailers is prohibitively expensive, so the challenge is to source materials and construct said traps on a budget and with effectiveness. A difficult challenge, but one which I want to get done very quickly, and to get on to the music producing.

Oh and did I mention vocal booth? Eeep another pet peeve. At present, due to all of the acoustic disturbances, recording any acoustic source is troubled with high background noise levels. A makeshift vocal booth has been setup, but this provides merely reflection control rather than any real acoustic isolation.

More updates to come as materials come to hand.

Mix/master sent yesterday in the early hours. Received mix mod request and mastering for more brightness. To aid this task, installed the living room amp and speaker into my monitoring environment, with a single B&W monitoring the mono mix, positioned at a recessed 2m from the mix position (as opposed to 1m for the near fields). This now provides an alternative window into the mixes and one that was valuable during the revised louder and brighter master for Pat’s track today. Awaiting his second round of comments. The track is to be entered into a competition tonight/tomorrow.

Other major activity was the Hey Big Aki mix session. Great day and night had by all greatly improving our previous efforts. Most of the band were present and this yielded a jovial and hard working environment. The session was roughly 2 pm till 10 pm with appropriate breaks. Mixes monitored in car stereos as well. Minor mods requested (on bass, vox and snare) and will be performed this evening. This should now be close to final. A great experience and the most challenging (the most acoustic tracks) project to date. Also the group buy in (5 members) largest to date, and was thus was a good learning experience in compromise.

Now travelling to see my niece for the first time!

I had good fortune in witnessing the 5th public showing of Beaufield. Extremely proficient 3 piece outfit, led by sublime keys and vocals, supported mind bendingly in the groove with sublime drumming, and rounded out with flawless bass. A huge sound, skillful songwriting and arrangement, fluent and effortless musicianship. A stark reminder of the writer’s musical limitations.

So much cyclical volatility still present within base camp. Work continuing and progress sought, however the health of partaking members coming under scrutiny. Much effort has been expended thus far.

In other news, I had the good fortune to be on the receiving end of a pair of Avantone Active Mixcubes following the due exchange of monetary goods. Following unpacking and setup on T’s machine, I was quite simply amazed at the fantastically pure phatom centre – I had to double check that the laptop’s internal speakers were not operating and providing such directional power. It was not a mistake; these little beauty’s were producing a sound in which the centre is literally spewing forth from the computer screen in front. Truly a revelation of what is possible from a single driver speaker. It truly demonstrates the limitations of my current 2-way system. Any future 2-way or up purchase will be judged by its ability to produce such a sublime stereo and centre image. Looking forward to using them in future mixes.

It has become apparent, largely to my own ears, that my mixes are too shallow. To many, this is one of the principal factors between a mix sounding amateurish and professional; professional mixes tend to envelope the listener in a three-dimensional environment and transport the senses to a different time and place; whereas the amateur mixer (myself included) tend to present a flatter and two-dimensional representation of the song. Well, acknowledgement of the problem is a good starting point, right? So where to now?

Well googling this has brought out a few articles; Mixing with Depth and How to Create Depth in a Mix.

The articles point out some previously known techniques. I guess the main lesson here is to apply these techniques in a more systematic and structured way, paying closer attention to the depth in professional mixes. I think I have previously attempted to make a strong mix by making the drums very dry along with most instruments – I guess I’ve been reverb shy. Best to up this usage in future.

Time tonight to continue the exploration of these techniques.

The final track list:

1. Metal of Hades (T. Vu)
2. Ancestry (T. Vu and writer)
3. Going to LA (T. Vu and writer)
4. Lover’s Ode (T. Vu)
5. In Dreams (T. Vu)

Produced by T. Vu

Recorded, mixed and mastered by writer and T. Vu

The (lossy encoded, low quality) tracks can now be streamed from motherBIRD’s myspace

So a big effort from T. Vu and I has come to an end. Many many months and many, many hours of recording, scrutinising, editing, processing, blending, assembling and packaging comes to a close. Well overdue of course. A massive learning experience and once which has forced a rethink of the mixing methods employed.

The mastering was completed over a week or so, with many revisits and changes during that time. As not usually advisable, the mastering and mixing was performed by the same team, so inevitably, there will be imbalances in the end product due to the monitoring system (i.e. speakers + room + humans) being a constant during the process. No doubt, a better master would have been achieved by looking for professional services, and of those employing pleasant-sounding hardware devices as opposed to my purely in-the-box treatments. But the hope is that this finished demo is representative of the time and place of these songs, and that they are durable in some artistic sense.

As for the future? These are uncertain times; the completion of a process will always spawn new paths for the protagonists to select from and follow. Rather than stability, we are at a crossroads for the players. The success, or rather lack of for this project, will appear to impact somewhat on future collaborations, so much is riding on this. Arguably that is an over-reaction for a demo collection, and in the biased perception of the writer, much was done to assure a good result. But it is more than just the audible instructions within the optical media; it is the process and experience which determines the prospective futures, and ultimately a decision which has future growth in its primary interests.

4 tracks for the motherBIRD EP mastered in the last few weeks.

Was a desire from the client to include a new song into the release, ‘In Dreams’. An outsider track following a promising start, this track was vocal recorded at the same time as the rest of the tracks, and as such, is in the same vein as the others.

Rerecorded the bass and added a guitar for the pre-chorus and chorus to add some impact.

Tried a remix of the drums using bass and kick drum combined compression (std. technique but new for this rookie mixer) and resulted in a nice smooth sound. Attempted a std rock bass / kick eq trick (9dB peak at 100 Hz for kick, 9dB trough at 100 Hz for bass) – found nice separation and maybe cool for rock songs, but for this track (if you need a reference, think trip hop) then the bass cut just pulled too much away. So this one didn’t quite work out. Will keep it in safe keeping for the next ‘Killers’ type track I mix.

Personal development with a move of week-daily routine at the start of next month – into the unknown again – a trend?

10:00 – Automobiling to suburban shopping centres. After 5-10 minutes, realise that using a personal vehicle was a very inefficient, polluted heavy, and ultimately unneccessary waste of resources. Fortunately on the way there I make use of the in car CD player and listen to the motherBIRD master disc recently burnt. A few observations:

1. Ancestry – Kick drum doesn’t boom enough – especially obvious in intro. Maybe a tom drum in sync would help? Vocals a bit distant and difficult to understand. Guitars don’t offer much pow. Very loud
2. Going to LA – Drums a bit too loud, especially the snare. Bass guitar dominates too much over bass pedals. Organ good level. Vocals sound excellent.
3. Lover’s Ode – Keys a bit soft. Bass keys surprisingly intelligible and providing enough foundation. A bit too distorted
4. Metal of Hades – Drums not providing enough drive and punch, also true for bass. Vocals OK.

Most tracks sound a bit too compressed/limited overall. Probably need to back off on this a bit.

Back to driving – As I am almost there, I continue on. Looking for various work and casual wares of the long clothed variety. Eventuate with department store work and casual clothes of the cheaper variety.

12:00 – Recollect that there is a clearance clothes outlet nearby and swing by. 45 minutes later emerge with a large bill but much apparel to offset the cost.

14:00 – Return for lunch and catchup with T

15:15 – Head into the city with T for the overcoat quest.

17:30 – Emerge after many hours searching and deliberating with arguably the finest piece of clothing I have had the fortune to wear and own. A beautiful black overcoat, perfect for work and casual wear in the winter time. The dishevelled dress is being eaten into.

18:30 – Unhealthy evening meal of greek  and potato.

19:20 – Leave for Band 2′s night gig at the Town and Country Hotel in St Peters.

20:15 – Hit stage and have a very good performance. During some parts of the performance, especially the solo sections, I feel an overwhelming confidence and see the future movements most clearly, but also have the sense to be simultaneously free also to improvise. A very assured but also spiritually connected performance, more with my own playing rather than the music itself, although the songs greatly facilitate this opportunity. Realise that for future gigs I need a dedicated guitar amplifier to cut through, and also that the electronic drums need a proper stereo PA to punch through as the keyboard amplifier isn’t cutting it anymore.