I’ve been watching a great youtube show called ‘Pensado’s Place’ which consists of Dave Pensado, a top mixing engineer based in Hollywood, California and his manager Herb talking mixing with in depth hands on demonstrations and incredible guests.

Pensado’s Place

Check it out, it has a lot of brilliant insights and handy hints.

The thing I want to expand upon exactly is a metaphor Dave used to explain mixing.

“Mixing is very much cooking.”

Now, let’s deconstruct the metaphor. With cooking you have a meal you are aiming to make. To get that meal you follow or create a recipe using the ingredients you have at home and the ones you go and buy (or grow). Now you use kitchen techniques and implements to prepare the food, cook the food and serve the food. Now based on all these components each one will dictate if the meal is what you were aiming for in terms of taste, color, texture, presentation, balance, the amount of food and how good the food is overall.

Now, we can liken this process to mixing, pretty much substituting mixing components straight up. You have a song you want to create by mixing it, you have that picture where you want to end up, you know how you want it to sound. There’s your recipe. Now you have your sound sources. You might use stock content like samples and prerecorded material. Sometimes you’ll be starting from scratch so you’ll go and record the source material, one could say you go and buy the ingredients etc. Now that you have your tracks (ingredients) you now need to prepare them through the editing process (preparing). Once you have the tracks trimmed up with edits and fades and gain staging (cutting, chopping, peeling, defrosting etc) you will need to start to mix them together. You can start by sorting out basic levels through your main fader’s (deciding upon the amounts you need and where), then you can start panning (mixing ingredients together), then you can start EQ’ing, compressing, limiting, effecting and so on. (This part could be liken to actually cooking what you have prepared.) Then once you have finished the mix you need to do your minute touches to get a nice balance across speaker systems. (Adding seasoning) Once you have your mix down, you will bounce it down to two track and prepare it for mastering (serving up your meal in a dish) Then your mix goes off to mastering or you might do it yourself. (You might clean up the plate and have a final taste to make sure the meal is complete taste and presentation wise.) Now you have your final product, off to distribution and then consumption. Exactly the same as when a meal gets served and eaten.

Now it kind of simplifies the whole mixing process but I think it’s a very close comparison.

You can’t cook a high quality meal if you have poor ingredients. You can only make poor quality ingredients into a certain level of meal but you’ll have to prepare it a lot more and use different ways to cook it to get it there. Sometimes people make their own recipes and when they don’t have a vision or plan it out the results may not be what they expect. You can easily burn a very good cut of meat. Too much of one meal can get boring. You can have the most expensive kitchen ever but if the cook using it can’t use it the meals will still come out as good as the cook can make them. Some people just don’t like certain foods. Some people like particular types of cooking. And it goes on and on. I think it’s such a great metaphor as pretty every single statement I can make about cooking it also applies to music once you put it into context.

If you can’t find the problem with a mix, maybe go through the cooking process and eliminate each stage. Might it be the overall recipe? (Producer/song?), are some of the ingredients off? (Are some of the instruments out of tune?), Were the ingredients prepared correctly? (Were the tracks edited to eliminate errant noise and tracks comped for the best performances), do you have the proportions of the ingredients correct? (Is something mixed too loud or soft?), Is something over or under cooked? (Have your effect or under effected something in the mix?), Is the presentation messy? (Is the final mix translating?), Are you serving the meals on time, in the correct location and to the right people? (Mastering problems? Distribution problems?), Are the people eating the meal enjoying it and has it met or exceeded their expectations? (Was the overall song good or bad?).

The thing is you can go on and on with the metaphor and it holds up which is so great. To be able to liken the entire process so other people can maybe understand something better is a great thing.

Russel Murton

Club LED Newcastle on the 28th of October was an absolute killer show! Above is the front of house view with the house lights on, I didn’t get many shots with the new camera, I need to get a new memory card for it so I have some more space to take more photos on the night! As you can see, hopefully, we have the LS9-16 at front of house with the lovely little LED music stand light I picked up from Muso’s Corner a few months back. On the right in the interface rack containing the RME UFX Fireface which is one of the most brilliant pieces of gear I have used in a long time. For a compute interface to provide 30 inputs and 30 outputs in a single one rack unit space is pretty intense in the first place, then add to the fact is has four high quality mic pres (And when I say high quality, I mean very high quality), which accept mic, line and Hi-Z(DI) inputs, as well as eight additional line inputs on the back and 16 channels of ADAT input and AES/EBU as well. Then all of this can be transmitted to a computer via USB or firewire. That makes one brilliant interface on it’s own, then add top notch drivers and an extremely extensive DSP mixer and control program. The icing on the cake is the direct to USB recording the unit offers. I can plug in an external HDD, the grey unit you see next to the laptop with the blue light, and recording directly from the interface, meaning the 16 channels from the LS9, the 8 lines from the  M-Audio 2626 below the UFX and the four mic pres on the front of the UFX can all be recorded without a computer. The computer makes it easy to setup the recording, but it can all be recorded from the front panel of the interface. It has been 100% rock solid thus far. You’ll see my Lenovo tablet PC on top of the interface rack to play background music between the bands, usually with the docking station to play CD’s for band intro’s but I forgot it this gig!, and to control the UFX recording and provide large meters always accessible at a glance for every channel.

You can’t really see it in the photo but I’m running four QSC KW181′s clustered 2×2 in the centre with two QSC KW153′s on stage raised a little with some milk crates to get above the audience. This FOH speaker combination is something very nice for this venue and the genre of music, metal in this case. The speakers are extremely clear and the RMS limiting is very clean and unobtrusive. The overall output of them also fits the bill for the gig, I haven’t used a proper db metre at taken a reading but I’m happy with the overall output and I’m not wanting any more volume.

The other thing you’ll see in the photo above is a wireless router. This aspect of the A rig is one I’m highly impressed with and has got many positive comments about from bands and crowd members thus far. The LS9-16 can be controlled wirelessly from a ipad using the Yamaha Stagemix application. This has allowed me to wander around the venue and listen where the members of the audience actually are and make changes on the fly. I can also jump up on stage during changeover and mix the bands monitors right next to them and actually hear what they are hearing. Like I said, very impressed thus far.

There’s two snaps from some of the bands, as I said before, I wish I had a memory card for my new camera so I could take a few more shots. As you can see the lighting on the night was top notch, with some new additions from Lights In Production including some new UV bars and some mini movers in wash with some spots to come.

The show also marked the first use of the Sennheiser EW500 G3 E945 wireless microphone in  a proper setting apart from simple speech. You can see Greg from Viral Millennium in the second picture.

I’m currently mixing Viral Millennium’s up coming album, we saw a sneak peak of two of the tracks from it at this show and how their sound is evolving. Some cool stuff is coming up.

Remember, Club LED is on the last Friday of every month at the Newcastle District Tennis Club in Broadmeadow. RPM Audio will always be handing the sound reinforcement for the show, so come and say Hi! if you are out and about!

Cheers,

Russel Murton

RPM Audio

My new Denon AH-D2000′s arrived today in the post all the way from the USA after two weeks eagerly waiting for them, after a massive bit of research to find a new pair of headphones, to use as a common reference point to base live and studio mixes from.

I first started looking at a lot of youtube videos and one series of videos caught my eye. The 7 or 8 part series of videos was done by Dave Rat, Red Hot Chili Peppers FOH sound man for 20 years+, so you’d assume he knows his stuff.

There’s part one of the video series, he tests a massive range of headphones in the quest to replace his current headphones, which have been discontinued and cannot be repaired as spare parts for them cannot be found anymore.

I highly suggest watching his other videos, he has a lot of great insights into live sound production, his approach to group compression and the use of VCA’s is particularly amazing.

Now, from Dave’s videos, we find that these headphones are particularly flat, tick! We then find that my current headphones before these, the Sennheiser HD280 PRO’s suffer from an amazing bug where an object with some mass is resting against the headphone makes it clean up it’s response considerably as well as it’s low end response. Dave thinks it might be the cup design causing cancellations as they flex.

Later on in the series Dave takes the best headphones he had tested thus far and introduces a new test, a test of their low end response, in particular the ability to maintain a sine wave as low as they can and the amount of harmonic distortion down low. The Denon’s performed amazingly in this test, showing extremely low voltage (volume) loss ending up 6db down at 20Hz which is amazing, minimal harmonic distortion and maintaining a sine wave down to 20Hz and barely triangling at 15Hz. Very top notch.

Now, with Dave’s opinion of these headphones I embarked on product reviews of these cans and threads on them in Audiophile headphone forums. Many failed to notice that their sound is indeed ruler flat and complained of a lack of warmth or such other characteristics that actually mean coloration. The name of the game is a reference set of headphones so you can listen to exactly how some recordings actually sound without additional EQ being added by your headphones. So if you hear too much bass or some such, it’s probably because the studio who recorded the track wasn’t monitoring with a sub or had it too low and compensated for it. That’s the thing, unless you push through pink noise and use an RTA you are going to have your ears and your source material impacting on how the headphones sound. Take those variables away and you have an objective test, so in the end you will have a pair of headphones that you can trust to be accurately reproducing the source so you can concentrate on the source.

Now, onto my listening. I plugged these into my little Focusrite Saffire which I use at home to keep my set of Yamaha MSP5′s plugged in always as well as having two preamp’s on hand and a decent headphone output. I loaded up the new website you are reading this on right now and streamed By The Numbers – Threats, one of my first live recordings which I enjoy putting on and listening to, to this day. The sound stage was what first struck me, you can hear panning extremely precisely. Some say there are a limited number of pan postition’s that you can accurately pick out (center, 15, 30, 45, 60 using a certain pan law, basically there are around 11.) and with these headphones you can pinpoint them all exactly. Hearing the drum overheads image the spread of the drumkit allows you to pinpoint the sparkle of extremely low cymbal touches and get a lovely sense of movement on tom rolls. You can hear the lovely play between the guitar and the sax, each in their own slot as they were on stage. Very impressed thus far.

Then my attention was drawn to the bass and kick relationship. One wrought with phase problems you must solve in their timing so they don’t cancel the other out. The bass response of these headphones bring me much more confidence in doing such things. I listened to a few tracks I mixed out of Teenage Kicks studio knowing I had mixed them a little too bass heavy before we got a sub in there. You can tell, then you move to tracks after we got a sub and it’s like night and day, the bass pushes back and sits where you intended it to sit.

Next I put on some metal, as much of my work recently has been in the metal scene, I started off with War Faction, again streamed from this site, my initial assessment of having the vocals too low was once again confirmed (Supposedly it is the style AKA Lamb Of God but I disagree…). You could hear more of the crowd and for the first time the very subtle snare reverb I put on. So a big Tick! for that, being able to hear the quality in reverb tails is one major indication of high quality speakers, in my opinion it has translated across to headphones as well!

Next I put on some Viral Millennium, of which I am currently engrossed in mixing an album from, and I’m hearing so much more detail and depth to sounds that I have been messing with for the past few weeks. The number of new approaches that have come to mind upon listening to these tracks with the Denon’s is amazing. They have taken the speakers out of the equation so you can just concentrate on the source material. Exactly what I wanted.

I think for an inital impression I’ve covered a fair amount. In the following weeks and days I’ll put these through the ringer listening to many albums I know very well like Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Opeth’s Lamentations live DVD. They have made listening to music an outright pleasure as oppose to before, an before was a brilliant experience, so it gives you an idea of how pleased I am with these headphones.

For the price, I don’t see many other headphones coming near this level of quality, the big brother AH-5000′s and AH-D7000′s are more than double the cost of the AH-D2000′s and many reports are right in saying that you can’t possibly get twice as better as these headphones, to justify double the money spent.

One very happy customer,

Russel Murton