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Re: Re: OT: final mixing and mastering of film score....hints?



On 7/22/64 11:59 AM, Per Boysen wrote:

These are fantastic suggestions, Per (as always).
I've never used the last one but it's a brilliant way to manually control the stereo effect.
Thanks for yet another tool for my producing tool box.

Appreciatively,   Rick
(I reproduced them in case anyone missed this great post)


Any more "live making" techniques?
I think the general "holy graal" in mixing recorded music is
side-chaining. The reason for that belief is that this comes closest
to how our ears and brains make us experience the sound of real music,
when heard on location rather than through a recording. The brain is
capable of focusing on many simultaneous details of what we're hearing
and then de-code these impressions by super fast analysis of early
reflections by the acoustic environment. This is why we can follow a
soft sound although surrounded by loud noise. All this doesn't work in
a recording medium (since there are no environmental reflections
except for the listening room related to the two speakers). And I
think side-chaining is a good way to fake it in a recording.
Technically you set up a routing in a mixer where certain sounds
affect other sound, by volume or timbre. The idea is that when one
instrument makes a sound that is important for the music, some other
instruments back off a bit to make room. This is actually how
musicians in an ensemble do play together, to "live perform
side-chaining" ;-)  It's all about making as many details as possible
dynamically related. They already are so, in a strictly musical sense
- because if not the music would suck - but I'm talking more
"sound-wise" here. A great metaphor to get started is to listen to the
music as inter-playing frequency bands. Step one is to find out what
particular bands make sense to juggle with and step two is to juggle
them nicely, putting back the organic element.

Another general tip:
you might want to make the stereo perspective extreme, because there
may come sync sound and dialog in the middle. There are plugins to
broaden or narrow a stereo image but you can do it manually as well
(with better control) by setting up this routing matrix: Clone the
signal into three channels. Revers stereo image for channel one, phase
invert and lower the level a tiny bit for channel two and make channel
three mono. Now, these three channels is your tool to achieve all
kinds of stereo perspective, from the broadest that sounds wider than
physical speaker positions to a punchy and focused up-your-face mix,
and you get full mono compatibility in the package. The process also
opens up for tricks like processing different parts of the stereo
image differently (level balancing, EQ, compression).

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.perboysen.com
http://www.youtube.com/perboysen