Oh boy … strap in for what has to be my most controversial article yet! Although the title might be a touch misleading, this article is more to do with my personal philosophy that deals with deciding whether to take a job or not in general. The ‘working for free’ portion of that philosophy being the most contentious. At the outset I’ll say that not everyone will agree with this, and that’s perfectly fine. Everyone’s career path is different! Like I mentioned, the basis of this article is dealing with the topic of deciding whether to do a job or…
Author: David Lauritsen
This … I feel, is an important one. Primarily because Audio Engineers and Producers and the like are notorious for making unwise purchases, whether they be hardware or plugins. I, too, have suffered the same affliction and have come up with strategies to deal with these tendencies that have worked well for me, and if you resonate with what I suggest in this article, I hope you’ll find it helpful too. As someone who has made a living from audio, it’s important to get this balance right. You need to make purchases to continue doing great work, but at the…
Multiband Dynamics, which often take the form of Multiband Compression is a very powerful method of signal processing, but I feel that a lot of people don’t quite recognise the time and the place for it! Firstly, I would suggest that there is perhaps no wrong place for it, and I would encourage all readers to try to use it in any instance where they might reach for an Equaliser (EQ). What you will find is that Multiband Compression can sometimes fill the shoes of an EQ, and by reaching for it more often, you will get a feel for…
This is a technique that I’ve iterated on for many years now. It’s a technique that I’m forever drawn to, and for me it has two applications: When I want to give a tonal quality to something that doesn’t yet have one, and When a sound already has a tonal quality, and I want to enrich it The demonstration for this is in the context of sound design to picture, however, I have used this technique in a professional context to enhance drum cymbals, guitar resonances/feedback and create a piano ‘feedback’ effect. The technique is a bit mathsy and nerdy,…
Mid-Side EQ is a special type of EQ which allows you to equalise the mid (centre portions of the stereo field) and the sides (left and right together) portions of the field independently of one another. It is known for its applications in Mastering, however, there are several use cases which I commonly gravitate towards in mixing and sound design. Number one: Side rumble reduction. A pet peeve of mine is having excessive bass frequencies in the far left or right of a stereo field when listening back over headphones. This isn’t a problem which bothers me when listening over…
Is 44.1 kHz the right sample rate for my music? What about 48 kHz? Why doesn’t everyone use 192 kHz for everything if it houses the most data? These are questions that gentle folk embarking on an audio production journey invariably come across, and this article is designed to answer these questions and more! Firstly, it should be known that 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz are widely recognized as the industry standard sample rates for recording and mixing. But why did we settle for, what are usually, the lowest options available on most DAWs? Surely technology and computation power has…
So, you want to get into sound design for film, television, animation, games or any other media? One of the key techniques is not only understanding your signal chain but having a chain that works for you and can deliver a range of various sounds. This is a technique that I’ve slowly developed over the years to the point where I have saved Pro Tools track templates for these settings. Most sessions I work on will have some of these effects auxiliaries in the SFX section ready to go for some enhancement and ‘weight.’ In this video, I show you…
If you make beats or mix music professionally or as a hobby, chances are the hardware and software you have will be sufficient for film audio mixing and sound design. The aim of this article is to somewhat demystify the tools for mixing audio for film and television, perhaps giving you confidence knowing that the tools required for film mixing are within reach! Digital Audio Workstation Firstly, the DAW. Pro Tools has long been the industry standard (I bet you’re tired of hearing that, eh?) for film and television post audio. There are lots of reasons for this, but it…
The combination of the two polar patterns in phase-aligned microphones can produce a third polar pattern. This can be very handy as a mixing and postproduction technique as you can spend less time experimenting and trialling different set ups while the artist is waiting and more time tracking vocals or letting the magic unfold.Using two switchable pattern microphones, like these AKG C414 microphones pictured, one of them can be set to cardioid and the other can be set to omnidirectional. This works well because while recording you can be monitoring and sending the cardioid microphone’s signal to the artist’s headphones,…
Putting a key change into a song is an incredible tool that can yield a multitude of results. It can give a song a dramatic lift or it can create a sense of mystery and surprise. It is also something that I know a lot of people struggle with! This article will give you a method with which to experiment with different key changes. The method is quite formulaic in nature, so it is important to experiment with different iterations found from the method! https://youtu.be/S-rB0pHI9fU (Even the Beatles couldn’t help but try out a cheeky key change. And it’s so…
