The audio needs at this year’s World Rowing Championships included live and streaming sound, eight commentary channels in multiple languages, wireless mics for the medal ceremonies and music playback—all handled on one console.
Poznan, Poland (November 30, 2020)—There are nautical enthusiasts who may row, row, row their boat gently down the stream—but they are nowhere to be found at the World Rowing Championships. The word “gently” doesn’t appear either, because the event draws the best athletic rowers from around the world and the competition is fierce. The three-day rowing regatta is the annual culmination of the sport, bringing with it all the drama and excitement that one might expect as boats tear their way across aquatic expanses in record time. Ensuring that all in-person spectators at this year’s edition, held on Lake Malta in Poznan, Poland in October, could hear the commentary and become immersed in the experience was audio engineer Marcin Baran of MTS Studio, who mixed the event on an Allen & Heath SQ-5 console.
Baran chose the SQ-5 to handle all live and streaming sound, including eight commentary channels in multiple languages, wireless mics for the medal ceremonies and music playback. The SQ-5 was fitted with an SLink card, giving Baran the extra SLink port needed to deploy independent GX4816 and DX168 I/O expanders. One expander fed the various zones of the lakeside complex, while the second fed the main PA in the medals area as well as multiple speaker zones in the stands, with help from the built-in delays on the SQ’s busses. Further mixes were sent to commentators’ headphones, to two separate livestreams and to an OB van.
As heats started on the far side of the lake and ended 2 km from the spectators, a key challenge was to give fans in the grandstands and viewers at home a sense of immersion in the races. A submix of ambient mics captured the waterside sounds and starting signal from the start line, sent via old analog cables laid under the lakebed many years ago. The signal proved quite noisy, so Marcin connected a laptop running Waves X-Noise Native via the SQ’s USB port to identify and tackle the problem frequencies. Once the boats were underway, feeds from ambient mics from cameras mounted on a boat that followed the athletes, keeping the audience in contact with the action on the lake.
With so many different elements to stay across, automation and streamlining of workflows were essential, as Baran noted, “I created one group for all commentators that didn’t feed into any of the mixes, but triggered the duckers on all music inputs. I used an analog Bettermaker mastering limiter for the streaming and I used eight instances of SQ’s DynEQ4 dynamic EQ on all the commentator channels. With the mixer set up in this way, everything practically mixed itself, leaving my hands free to look after the music. For me, the SQ is a small, handy mixer with enormous possibilities. I love using this mixer on tour with bands, also SQ-5 is the heart of my mobile recording studio setup.”
Dom Morley is a Grammy Award winning engineer and producer. Over a 20-year career, he has worked with many artists, including Adele, Sting and Amy Winehouse, and producers including Phil Spector, Mark Ronson and Tony Visconti. Morley can be reached at www.themixconsultancy.com
Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably noticed the rise in popularity of modular synths over the past few years. I got into it about seven or eight years ago, and I fear I am living proof of just how addictive they can be. I realize I could be accused of a certain amount of self-justification in this article, but trust me, they really are a useful tool for mix engineers.
First, a quick overview for the uninitiated. There are two common set ups, of which the one referred to as “East Coast” style is the more traditional. This is so-called because Moog synths were built on the east coast of the USA, as opposed to the slightly more esoteric Buchla synths which originated on the west coast at about the same time (‘west coast’ style, although hopefully you’d worked that out). The pros and cons of each method can cause some pretty heated debates in the world of synth-heads—debates in which neither Bob Moog nor Don Buchla were remotely interested.
Anyway, I digress.
There are few basic parts that are common to the traditional setup. You start with a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). This permanently generates a wave form—sine, triangle, saw and square are generally your choices—the pitch of which is decided by the control voltage (CV) that you send it from your keyboard or DAW. Normally you mix two or three of these VCOs together and then feed them into a resonant filter which shapes the sound by taking away harmonics, which gives us the term ‘subtractive synthesis.’ You’ve still got a permanent tone, so next in the chain is a voltage-controlled amplifier (VCA), which you normally turn down to silent so it can be turned up again by modules called envelope generators (often ADSR-style, if you’re familiar with hardware synths) which fire whenever they receive a ‘gate’ signal—which is triggered when a key on your keyboard is pressed (or, again, from your DAW).
Modular synths are becoming a useful weapon in the arsenal of mix engineers. Future Owns Future Owns
That’s the basics, but modular synthesis gets more interesting when you introduce different sources of modulation. Pretty much everything you can think of can be modulated by everything else, with low-frequency oscillators (LFOs), ring modulators and various styles of envelope generator all being part of the arsenal, but that’s another article.
“But,” I hear you wearily ask, “how is this useful to mix engineers?” Well…
Better synth sounds. If you find yourself being handed less-than awesome synth sounds to mix, then you’ve got a simple solution to that. Remember that a new filter can cost you less than £100, and each new filter opens up a whole raft of different tonal possibilities, so even a modest modular system can give you a wide palette of great analogue synth sounds. Ask for the MIDI along with the audio and you can quickly create sounds that not only lift the track but also make the mix easier.
Better filters. I know this sounds like it goes with the previous paragraph, but I mean something different here. In this application, you’re using the filters in your modular system like the filters on an EQ—because if you want to take the top off your bass track, you can obviously do it quickly with a nice clean plug-in, but with an extra minute of effort and a Moog low-pass filter, you’ve added some real character to your mix as well.
Extremely tweakable analogue effects. Although you can do everything in the box these days if you want to, sometimes you don’t. For these out-of-the-box moments, modular synths offer a lot of really fun, tweakable and fantastic-sounding effects, from simple spring reverbs (with up to three tank sizes that you can flick between) to deep granular delays. There are amazing sounding phasers, and tube VCAs that give you incredible distortion effects. If you think that you—or your clients—might enjoy manually playing effects instead of automating a plug-in, then a small Eurorack (3U modular synths) set-up might be right up your street. It’s just like building a small collection of guitar pedals, but one to which you only need to add an oscillator and you’ve got yourself an analogue synth.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to start recommending specific modules (feel free to contact me at themixconsultancy.com if you want advice on this—I can talk modular for days!) but perhaps you will now see a modular synth is not just a hipster’s plaything (although it is also that), or a synth-head’s money-pit (yeah, it’s definitely that, too), but also a useful weapon in the arsenal of a mix engineer.
Modular synths are becoming a useful weapon in the arsenal of a mix engineer.
Into The Groove Why do a lot of us audiophiles (and casual listener types) prefer the sound of records over the same music released digitally? Is it something about the inferiority of digital? Are vinyl records, without those sacrilegious anti-aliasing filters and stair-step samples, somehow higher in resolution? Or is it simply the much-heralded warmth of vinyl? Some would say digital is superior without the surface noise, side length limitations, and inner groove distortion. So what’s the point of putting digital mixes on an analog record? Records should be cut from an analog master, right? I’m not talking about the ritual of owning and playing records. Putting aside the factors of having a tangible object that requires more care and intention, along with the fun of combing bins for used treasures and everything else that goes with being a record collector, let’s explore the sonics and what’s responsible for that warm and fuzzy feeling we often get when having a platter party. Words and Photos by Dave McNair Everyone hears things differently. Folks have different tastes for what lights up that pleasure center in our brains. It’s a subject I talk about a lot with my audiophile friends, especially the […]
Brooklyn, NY (September 3, 2020)—The audio production of the Slate podcast Decoder Ring isn’t exactly minimalist, but “reduction” is one of the secrets behind producer Benjamin Frisch’s sound design. Using sound libraries like Epidemic almost as a DJ might, Frisch manipulates canned music beds and deconstructs them to create his own mixes.
“Production music generally, I think, is just overproduced,” says Frisch. “But oftentimes, if you shave off one stem—if you use just the drums and the instrumental and the bass, that’s suddenly a really cool rhythm track, whereas the melody on top of that could be really cheesy or get in the way.”
Decoder Ring producer Benjamin Frisch’s sound design is created applying a variety of tricks to make the most of canned music beds. Slate
Decoder Ring cracks open cultural mysteries in a similar way. In each episode, host Willa Paskin confronts a cultural question, object or habit in order to figure out what it means and why it matters. Alongside that curiosity, though, is a healthy dose of irreverence. Recent episodes have explored the rise and fall of the laugh track in sitcom television shows, the emergence of the “Karen” personality and the origin of the mullet hairstyle.
The soundtrack to the “Mystery of the Mullet” episode illustrates a technique Frisch often uses in the creative process. Once he found a composition he thought could fit the tone of the story, he downloaded the stems and slowly brought them into the mix.
“I’ll bring them in one at a time in a way that isn’t in the actual mix of the song, to give a little bit more of a progression or feel to it,” he says. “It’s really fun because it feels like you’re scoring a movie.”
Whether researching, interviewing or editing, Frisch says the quirks he and Paskin add as they wind through the wormholes are a way to have fun with their subjects. For the episode “Clown Panic,” which dives into the history of clowning and what has made clowns terrifying to some people, Frisch naturally began to dig through upbeat circus music. But in addition to being “too obvious,” he also found it repetitious and annoying—in other words, not fun. He went with a more subtle waltz, which evoked the idea of clowns without being hokey.
The soundtrack to the “Mystery of the Mullet” episode illustrates a technique Frisch often uses in the creative process. Slate
When it comes to recording narration and interviews, Frisch typically tracks Paskin on an Electro-Voice RE20 in the Slate studio. When a guest is a major focal point of an episode, like when Rebecca Black came in to discuss her 2011 viral hit song “Friday,” he prefers to record them at HQ or over an ISDN connection.
Pre-COVID lockdown, the show also used tape syncs often, but when the podcast lost access to the studio, Frisch gave Paskin a Rode NTG-2 and a Zoom H5 recorder so she could track from home. Guest audio is another story, though; he’s content with using VoIP audio from video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Skype for ancillary sources.
“I have never been nearly as obsessed with the sound quality of guest audio as some people are,” he says. “It’s only the two of us, and the way we work, it would not even be feasible for us to tape sync every person we want to talk to, just for cost and time reasons.”
There are also benefits to having audio tracks with tones and textures that listeners can easily distinguish from each other, he says. “What I like about having a lot of different sources of audio is it allows you to shift the focus. It separates the two scenes from one another, which I think is actually a really valuable thing.”
Unlike podcasts that work forward from a script, Decoder Ring goes in the opposite direction, starting with the idea. The real story only reveals itself through research and interviews, when they’re able to peel back the layers. Frisch develops audio as the story itself develops, shaping it to reflect the emerging narrative, and scripting is usually one of the last things completed before they record an episode.
“What we get in those interviews is what really dictates what the episode is about in some ways,” he says. “Sometimes we come in with a stronger idea about the big philosophical question of the episode, but a lot of the times, it’s really a process of discovery.”
Basel Music Academy in Switzerland is being outfitted with Lawo IP technology for recording contemporary electronic compositions.
Rastatt, Germany (September 2, 2020)—Electronic Studio Basel (ESB) at the Basel Music Academy in Switzerland is being outfitted with Lawo IP technology for recording contemporary electronic compositions and to train future prospective sound engineers.
The new audio mixing system, which was installed by Swiss system integrator SLC Broadcast, includes two identical 24-fader Lawo mc²36 consoles and corresponding interfaces (supporting MADI, Ravenna, AES/EBU, analog operation). The two stage boxes each provide 32 mic/line inputs, 32 line outputs, eight digital AES3 inputs, eight digital AES3 outputs, eight GPIO, a Ravenna port and a MADI tie-line port (SFP).
Also part of the upgrade are Horus and HAPI audio interfaces from Merging Technologies.
Great importance was reportedly placed on the scalability of the components during the selection of equipment for the upgrade. From small mobile recordings to large live concerts with parallel recording, the audio systems are required to use the same digital interfaces and network topology. For large ensembles with simultaneous recording, all components — including virtual soundcards on laptops — are called into use.
For around 150 years, the Basel Music Academy (Musikakademie Basel) has been a center of excellence for musical education at all levels. The academy places a high value on the use of current technology and equipment in its audio training, especially in the areas of recording studio technology and sound reinforcement.
A broad spectrum of studies, research and further education are offered under the Basel Music Academy umbrella, from early to new music, audio design to jazz, through the Basel School of Music, the University of Music FHNW (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz – University of Applied Sciences North-West Switzerland) with the Institutes of Classical Music, Jazz and Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, as well as the Institute for Further Education, improvisation.
Want to learn the secrets behind the sound production of the third season of Stranger Things? Look no further as Mix editor Tom Kenny interviews the Emmy-nominated team, including:
Craig Henighan, Supervising Sound Editor and Re-Recording Mixer
Will Files, Re-Recording Mixer
Mark Paterson, Re-Recording Mixer
For more Mix content on the sounds of Stranger Things, click here.
For more Pro Sound News content on the sounds of Stranger Things, click here.
Hebden Bridge, UK (August 18, 2020—Calrec has launched the Calrec Sound Institute, a series of online certification training courses focusing on the company’s products, and is also expanding its online training services.
The Calrec Sound Institute launches with courses for two of Calrec’s digital audio consoles, Brio and Type R. The courses provide an overview of the consoles for engineers and operators, as well as experienced professionals looking to hone their skills.
The courses cover hardware, I/O, routing, mix minus, busses and monitoring and are designed to get users up and running quickly. Once the training is completed, users are officially certified by Calrec.
Henry Goodman, director of product development at Calrec, said, “We have always had an open-door training policy at Calrec, but COVID-19 has significantly shifted the broadcast landscape and it’s our responsibility to help customers develop with tools that can be accessed remotely. As workflows continue to evolve, online training courses are increasingly important to help customers learn key products and be able to show that they have done so via certification.”
Calrec will expand its online training service with a series of AoIP masterclasses that cover what a broadcast facility needs to know about IP, how it works and the effect it is having on the industry.
“IP is a complicated subject; our new course will break IP down into independent and objective modules which we hope will enable broadcasters to make IP decisions with confidence,” adds Goodman. “It is a very broad course which covers the basics through to PTP, Multicast and the importance of intelligent network design.”
Alongside this, Calrec also offers:
Operator Manuals: Free operator manuals for every Calrec product.
Audio Primer: A 66-page basic introduction to Calrec functionality and applications that also provides a basic overview of audio theory, digital processing, applications and techniques relating to the broadcast industry.
Summa Training Course: A selection of 66 step-by-step video tutorials.
Cleaning Guide: Recommendations for cleaning Calrec equipment.
A DiGiCo SD9 is used for a variety of mix responsibilities inside The Cube.
Melbourne, Australia (July 10, 2020)—There may not be a lot of live events going on, but for those who long for EDM with the requisite visual grandiosity, they might do well to check out The Cube, a livestreaming event space gaining traction in the world of live DJ streaming. While visually impactful, the sound is equally important, and for the livestream broadcast mix, a DiGiCo SD9 is employed.
Aiming to embody the visual flair of a festival stage, the Cube is a compact streaming space created as a collaboration between Melbourne AV retailer Concert Audio Visual, lighting and visuals specialists VizFx and Melbourne-based online radio station LESH FM. The SD9, supplied by DiGiCo’s Australian distributor, Group Technologies, was chosen for mixing pre-broadcast audio, as well as handling the stage monitor mix, DJ Booth audio and Front of House mix.
Anthony Graziani, Concert AV’s Sales Manager and one of The Cube’s primary team members, explained, “The SD9 can accomplish a lot from such a compact format. The routing options and onboard signal processing mean we have something in place that is well suited for supporting DJ performance audio but can just as easily handle mixing an entire band for the stream, or whatever else you can throw at it.”
The team’s in-house engineer, Oliver Coupe Sando, adds that the SD9 was chosen for its sonic transparency.
“When we stream, we’re looking to introduce as little tone shaping and color to the sound as possible, so that we can translate what we’re hearing in the space, to people’s headphones and living rooms, with the maximum amount of clarity available to us,” he explains.
The newly-introduced Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 and PM3 will both be equipped with L-ISA DeskLink
Marcoussis, France (June 3, 2020)—Yamaha’s recently launched Rivage PM5 and Rivage PM3 digital mixing systems will be able to natively control L-Acoustics’ L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology, as they’ll be equipped with a L-ISA DeskLink for onboard control.
Co-developed by the two manufacturers, the DeskLink will be a feature of the upcoming Rivage PM firmware V4, currently set to be released simultaneously alongside the new Yamaha consoles. The firmware will also work with existing Rivage PM10 and PM7 digital mixing systems, thus bringing updated features including the L-ISA DeskLink, to those desks as well.
Within the Yamaha Rivage PM Series desks, for every mono or stereo input channel, direct control of L-ISA Objects or Groups will be available on the console control surface and touch screens. The five main L-ISA parameters—Pan, Width, Distance, Elevation and Aux send—will also be stored for each object in the console Scenes, with dedicated recall scope.
“More than three decades ago, Yamaha helped pioneer the digital mixer market, and has since remained one of the premier live console manufacturers,” says Sherif El Barbari, director of L-ISA Labs. “With the recent additions of the PM5 and PM3 to their Rivage range, Yamaha can now accommodate a much broader user base and allow them to each experience the future of live sound reinforcement in a very intuitive way, via L-ISA’s object-based mixing approach.”
“Yamaha is delighted to have been able to include L-ISA system control integration for the newly expanded Rivage PM family of consoles, through the recent launch of our new PM5 and PM3 console systems together with the V4.0 firmware release,” says Chris Angell, Yamaha R&D. “This opens the doors of our collaboration with L-Acoustics to an even wider range of customers and projects.”
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel often uses expansive, moving camera shots to create the bustling world of early-1960s New York City, requiring carefully choreographed boom work and sometimes dozens of open lavalier mics. Philippe Antonello
New York, NY (May 20, 2020)—It used to be that one page of screenplay equaled one minute of screen time. Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, creators and showrunners of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which streams on Amazon Prime, leave that rule of thumb in the dust.
Mrs. Maisel’s re-recording mixer, Ron Bochar
“Amy and Dan write episodes that are 70-some pages, sometimes 100 pages, long. Imagine all those words crammed into a 50-minute show,” says Ron Bochar, Mrs. Maisel’s re-recording mixer. Bochar is also co-owner of Manhattan audio post house c5, which handles all of the show’s ADR, Foley, editing and mixing work.
Happily, he and Mathew Price, CAS, the show’s production sound mixer, have their routine down to a fine art. “Mat records great material, both from a lavalier and a boom. I can’t work with one without the other; they both need to gel together,” says Bochar.
“My dialog editor, Sara [Stern], will do a lot of tweaky stuff, knowing I’m going to need to hear all those consonants. It’s smartly done, and it makes my life a lot better. We end up with lovely live performances, and a very wonderful live track that Mat’s recorded for me.”
Dialogue may be the “God track,” as Bochar refers to it, but there’s a lot going on in the background, too. “When they hired me to do the pilot, Amy said she didn’t want it to ever sound like a standard TV show. There weren’t going to be a lot of quiet moments, but if anybody did take a pause, she wanted to make sure that it was filled. As long as we can still hear what she wants us to hear, she wants everything else to be busy and lively.”
“This is definitely the most challenging show I’ve ever mixed,” says Price, whose resume includes every episode of The Sopranos. It’s not just that the camera is constantly on the move, requiring carefully choreographed boom work; some episodes also involve a lot of talking characters. For some scenes, Price has had to bring in a second mixer to handle the extra tracks and radio mics, boosting his department to six people.
For some scenes in the Catskills, he recalls, there was in-ear playback to 30 people, over a dozen lavalier mics, a live band and an MC with a mic. What’s more, a lot of the characters, including Miriam “Midge” Maisel (played by Rachel Brosnahan), were dancing, while talking, while the camera circled.
In the show, set in the 1950s and ’60s, Mrs. Maisel is an archetypal Upper West Side New York housewife who discovers a talent for stand-up comedy. As she progresses from the seedy clubs of Greenwich Village to larger venues, such as Harlem’s Apollo Theater, Bochar has “worldized” the soundtrack to put listeners into those respective spaces.
“Between picking a sound for the mic that she’s speaking into, picking a reverb for the room, or sometimes multiple verbs, the whole point is to make Maisel feel as real as we can,” says Bochar. “We’re trying to be precise to the reality that we’re seeing.”
There is no final dub, he adds: “The mix begins at the first edit,” a workflow followed by everyone on the sound team, which also includes Foley mixer George A. Lara and ADR mixers David Boulton and Mike Fowler.
“A lot of the Apollo stuff sounded the way it did based on a lot of the [loop] group,” says Bochar. “We were able to position the group at various places within the Apollo, creatively, to give it depth and space. Your mind says, oh, this is big.”
Mrs. Maisel’s production sound mixer, Mathew Price, CAS
“I think spaces have a real psychological component when you’re viewing, even if it’s subtle and you don’t realize it,” says Price, who consequently likes to use both boom and lav mics wherever feasible. “I like to open it up as much as I can. It also gives Ron and Sara choices.”
Like the background sound effects, the group walla track can be dense. “There were the elderly groups taking their kids to the Apollo, which means you have two levels of group that have to work together,” says Bochar.
“That episode [3.08: “A Jewish Girl Walks into the Apollo”] became the definition of what Mrs. Maisel is all about,” he says. “It had performance, smart social commentary, smart relationship issues, a lot of stuff that had to be balanced within the context of a normal Mrs. Maisel.”
Sherman-Palladino is very detail-oriented, orchestrating some scenes for maximum effect. “During a spotting session, Amy will say, ‘The laughs are all happening in the right places, but they’re wrong. This one should just be women reacting; here, maybe it’s just a couple of girls in the background; the men would get this.’”
In response to her notes, Bochar says, “A lot of times, we just recall a group and do another half a day of material. Amazon has been wonderful for allowing us to do that.”
Price switched out his venerable Audio Ltd 2000 radio mics for a 12-channel Zaxcom RX12 system after season two. He mixes to a Zaxcom Deva 16 with a Mix 12 control surface.
The show’s prop department went to New York’s Gotham Sound to incorporate new Shure TL lavs into the various vintage mics that Maisel uses at the different venues. “They became my primary source for all the standup,” says Price. “And I ended up buying a Shure TL48 [TwinPlex]; I use that on Rachel almost exclusively,” to match the modified standup mics. “I like the way they sound, nice and open and warm-sounding.”
Further raising the degree of difficulty for Price and his team, the showrunners have insisted on live bands, especially in season three. On the “Miami After Dark” episode, the jazz quartet was live, says Price. “And Amy didn’t want to see any mics.”
While Price handled the extensive dialogue tracks, a second mixer recorded the music. “We took a bi-directional capsule and put it behind the drums, away from the camera. Then there was a plant mic above, a Schoeps capsule. We put a mic on the piano lid for the bass, and another mic under the piano for the piano. And we put a lavalier mic on the trumpeter’s sleeve,” says Price.
The show is one of his career highlights, he says. “The whole cast is amazing. One reason it sounds so good is that we don’t have a whisperer or mumbler amongst them. And it’s such a family; it’s a happy set. Every one’s having fun.”
Hebden Bridge, UK (August 18, 2020—Calrec has launched the Calrec Sound Institute, a series of online certification training courses focusing on the company’s products, and is also expanding its online training services.
