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| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
i was impressed that he could just know in detail which where he could put a very specific frequency band. No spectrograms or visual aids, the guy must be approaching 50 so his hearing probably doesn't go past 10 but it was ridiculous watching him work. he mix we gave him was kinda shitty. He shook his head , and just went to work. I brought him a latte so he didn't mind me being there despite being in a bad mood. I didn't want to disturb him but this is pretty much what he was doing.
what i did notice was that he was using that frequency range in the mid lows - mid high hat has a limited stereo image and using that concept to fake perspective while finding room. It really was pretty cool.
If you ever get the chance to watch a pro, it is a learning experience. This mix was really busy. About 124 racks. He took a listen. Shook his head. He didn't bother with the group stems. Started from scratch. Was riding more than one fader at a time recording the automation in real time without making a mistake. I mean one pass. thats it. Like this guy was on speed.
And how he was able to organize things so fast. After the first listen, granted everything was labelled right using a colour scheme that many are used to, full orchestra was panned and grouped in 10 minutes. He did 4 passes and managed to get all the level riding done. I'm sure he did some final tweaks later on but man this guy was fucking sure of everything.
And it is a good feeling when your engineer appears to know what he is doing. Micromanaging is just a pain in the ass.
I asked about him and he used to record orchestras. Huge setups, MAin ORTF, omni flanks, house cardioids, ortf for winds, cardiods for harp percussion ..... And he would just invent he scheme in his head asking who the conductor was, and what orchestra and with he score. This guy could flip thru a conducor score and make decisions based on that . I mean most engineers can't reaad music, this guy could read a conductor score rather well.
now that is an engineer. I mean imagine watching Lang Lang on he piano and you wonder how the fuck. Well here are engineers like that. Virtuosic in every sense of the word. And that oldschool way of doing it. Where you just do it, and thats it. No double takes because your mic spacing is wrong or your mics are at the wrong height. |
Fuck this sounds exactly like one of the main engineers at work.
I mean I think it IS him.
Was his name Alan by any chance?
I can't tell you how much i learned in the first month just sitting there with my mouth shut just watching them. It was stuff I couldn't even understand from a technical point, even though I could see the processes and had been an engineer for close to 10 years.
To be honest, all but one of the truly great engineers I've been lucky enough to work with have that exact demeanor. Gruff, borderline pissed with everyone, like to work in silence but so fucking damn good at what looks like instinctive on the fly decision making....
....but the truth is, that in most situations, it's simply the vast experience of having done it a thousand times before.
Going back to the orchestra aspect: all of the great score mixing engineers I know are active and current live orchestra recording engineers.
Now if you put that in to context; that they create the mic list and mic arrangement based on the composition, orchestra and conductor, then they have to mix that on the other end when the recording is done, it becomes second nature to know where everything is.
In fact, I know one major score engineer that asks to be the recording engineer whenever he's asked to mix a film project for that very reason - it's the control of recording it exactly the way you want to mix it and takes 99% of the guess work out of how to mix it all.
Finally, on the actual subject of panning, what you're talking about is frequency based stereo image separation. Score engineers often do this based on a LCRLsRsLFE (i.e. 5.1 setup) then just bounce those down to stereo with a preset mix ration for the channels involved.
Therefore with a 5.1 setup you're panning different things automatically based on their frequency band, and ultimately, this comes from knowing the instruments invloved.
So for instance we were working on a large 2008 super hero blockbuster
film. We were recording cello overdubs, which doesn't go low enough as an instrument (under normal conditions) to be in the LFE channel, so we set up four mics: L, R, Ls & Rs, two in front, two above and behind.
You now know you have the channels to be panned. From here you can place the balance of those channels anywhere you want in the image field, but (and there's the whole secret to it) the way they do it is based on frequency as you'll also have many other instruments all using 4 mics, 3 mics, 2 mics or 1 mono mic.
The basic principles goes that the higher the frequency the wider you can go with your panning but your can essentially "trick" the listener in to hearing a wider space by exponentially (rather than linear) increasing the width as you go up the spectrum.
The real pros do this however based on the score itself, not just the potential range of a given instrument.
It's actually incredible how much more you can do when you have this down. In that same film, we had one cue that maxed out at over 500 tracks, from a 48 piece orchestra and hours of studio overdubs and the engineer found space for all of them. He was riding 8 faders at once for most of the mix, on a 264 channel (96 physical) and that was linked, controlling another 264 channel desk in the other mix room.
The main thing that bugs me about guys like this is the lack of second guessing and them just fucking knowing they get it right first time.
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