6-7 hours at the studio. Today was a good day. Definitely
good.
I started with the same set up as yesterday. 2 akg 451s. One was facing the sound hole. Another one was pointed at strings at the rear of the piano. It
was comforting and unusually easy. The same things all over again: put the
stands where they supposed to be, get the mics set up, rap cables around the
stands, patch things up. Here an engineer gets pleasure from the mere fact that
sound is transformed into a clean signal. On the other hand, composing comes
with a feeling of insecurity. Even if you feel yourself a newborn Picasso and
really like what you created, there might be a billion of people that don’t. In
this case, you, as a composer, are bound to fail.
I had a question about phase meter. Well, apparently the arrow is
supposed to show around 0. And the less phasing there is, the better the mix
would sound in mono. The arrow was showing around +.5 in my case, so I thought
it wasn’t too bad. I moved mics around but couldn’t get it to be closer to 0,
so I decided to leave it as it is.
I used 2 vintech preamps and the phoenix valve compressor.
By the end of the day, our head engineer Dave explained me that a compressor's output doesn’t actually boost the
signal. It just lets it go through. Therefore, when setting the right levels before
recording, it's best to start of with an output all the way to the left. He also
explained how to add distortion to an audio. For that to happen, one needs to
crank a compressor’s input up, while decreasing its output.
Also, the fact that VU meter on the board is redlining turns
out to be not a big deal as long as it is not consistently reaching its limit.
That is because VU meter doesn’t actually show peaks.
After some time I finally figured out the needed thought
process.
When a vu meter is redlining, one should bring up the output trim and
lower the threshold. Now that the volume is kinda low, one can bring up the
gain.
On the other hand, when recording piano, it is important to
keep in mind that pianist is playing softly because the music probably requires
to be quite and soft. So one should not use a lot of compression when
mixing/recording classical piano. A lot of compression, however, could make sense in a different genre.
I figured out that while mixing or recording, I should also be in a board mode (input flip switch is blue). Then if I assign a track’s output to 1, the 1st
console strip controls that track. To be able to use ProTools section in this
board mode, I should turn the “channel” switch on.
Finally, I decided to set up a room mic. I used 2 AKG 414: a cardioid and a figure 8 pattern. The
cardioid was facing the piano, while the figure 8 was set up right above it,
upside down, and catching acoustic waves from the sides.
- by the way, Dave advised to use compressor later on during the mix and record the signal only through the preamp.
This way, one would patch the cardioid mic into analogue input 25 and assign the track to output
14. At the same time, an engineer would patch the figure 8 mic into input 26
and assign the track to outputs 15-16. Turn on the phase switch on either 15 or 16 channel. Pan the cardioid mic to the middle
and the figure 8 to the far right and left. Slowly turn up the volume of the figure 8
mic, looking at the phasing meter. When it is very loud, phasing might occur.
An engineer could also split an audio of the figure 8 mic
into 2 signals using mult function.
He showed me how to do that, as well as set up the
headphones. However, since I haven’t had time to practice, I’ll talk about it
tomorrow.
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