The Questions in your Mind
December 23, 2007
As you are mixing some instruments and vocals together, there are several different questions you can keep asking to evaluate which channels need to be modified. At the typical youth event or concert, the primary question is “Is this as loud as I can get it?” Even in my own high school years I got a thrill from being in the front row or mosh pit and see how much noise I can sustain. Hearing the actual instruments or words to the song came second to thinking I’m cool because the subwoofer was disrupting my digestion.
But as I find myself mixing worship events and caring more about hearing the words and the subtleties between different instruments, the main question I try to keep my focus on is “What can I turn down?” It’s not that I don’t want anything to be loud, I still appreciate the quantity at times (and I’m not 30 yet). But the most common mistake when mixing is to turn channels up when something isn’t right. For example, the band is picking up volume and it’s hard to hear the singer, so you go and turn up the microphone volume. But then the guitar is getting lost in the background and you turn it up. Before you know it, your volume has increased too much for the room size or possibly distorting.
So instead, try to keep things at your target volume, and when you think the vocals or a certain instrument is being lost or drowned out…ask yourself what can be turned down to fix this mix. That way you keep your overall volume consistent, and you can highlight the quality of the mix without faking it with quantity.
As I think about it, this principle is a main focus for a lot of audio engineering aspects, not just the house mix. I apply the same principle when trying to use the equalizer to fix the tone of a channel or mix. When a channel doesn’t sound right and the EQ needs to be modified, I think of which frequencies can be cut and do so, only increasing on the rare exceptions when too many cuts have already happened or there really is a need for boosting just a single frequency by a small amount.
This principle is especially important when mixing monitors and even in ears. The biggest trap you can fall into is turning up instruments or microphones when a musician asks you to. This is especially problematic when a single monitor speaker is shared between two or more musicians. For example, the lead singer says they need more vocal and you turn it up, then the guitarist says he needs more. As soon as you turn the guitar up, the vocalist again says he needs more. Neither realize that the vocal range and guitar range are close in frequency range and are literally drowning each other out, competing for which input has more dominance in the monitor. And you become stuck with this really loud monitor that is competing with and possibly overpowering the FOH (Front of House) speakers.
With dedicated monitors or in-ears, you can evaluate which instrument or channel is most important to the musician and make sure the mix reflects that, turning down other channels until the instrument they want is at the forefront (which 99 out of 100 times is their own instrument or vocal). With shared monitors, you will have to communicate with the musicians to work out a compromise, or try to arrange the stage so that complimentary (instead of competing) instruments are sharing the monitor feed. When the guitarist is asking for more volume, you can tell him or her that the monitor is as loud as you can allow it and ask if other instruments can be turned down instead. Usually the people sharing the monitor can agree to some kind of compromise.
December 28, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Interesting… Good luck asking the guys I play with to turn down!
When the intensity of a song increases, how do you allow that without turning the music down to a point where that intensity is lost? Is that a dumb question?
As a musician, it takes more discipline to not play too loud than to actually master the instrument!
December 28, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Well, I can’t say that you never turn things up, there are definitely times that you want to bring things up…for example, I turn up the lead guitar if there’s a special part or solo, etc. Likewise I tend to turn up drums and sometimes everything at the peak of various songs that call for it, for example, Chris Tomlin’s version of “The Wonderful Cross” will see a lot of volume increases.
To play quietly definitely takes a level of skill. At River Oaks Community church, we were in a relatively small gymnasium, and it took a lot of effort on the drummer’s part to play quietly enough to not drown out everything and take over the whole room with the natural echoes of the room. His practice through years of playing in that gym made him incredibly talented.
I mentioned having a target volume and staying at that level. For example, at North Point and Willow Creek, they keep a reference mic running with analyzing software, and there is a written policy for what dB’s the auditorium should be kept at.
There’s also the idea of a base line volume. Going back to my gymnasium story, the drums literally defined the base line, or lowest volume possible. Even with the drummers talent at playing very well at a quieter than normal volume (for a drummer), he still defined the lowest volume I could have the room at…I had to turn up all the other instruments to match the drum volume and that was the lowest target volume I could have. Other times the guitarists use their own amp on stage, and for the audience in the first few rows, they could hear the amp or the monitors quite well, so other instruments would have to be turned up to match that volume.
So when quality is your primary target, the question is what *can* I turn down, sometimes you just can’t and do have to turn up other channels.
February 12, 2008 at 5:15 pm
[...] was thinking on the topic for this post awhile ago and Daniel’s post on the subject of reducing levels instead of constantly jacking things up reminded me of it. For me [...]