This week has been productive for my A Quiet Place II trailer. I have spent a few sessions in the S6 studio mixing and now have mastering left. I also have done a studio recording in class with Alex Mills. Finally, this week I have also done IEMs at Lifeplace Church.
I will start with IEMs (please reference my Finishing Off and Live Sound blog for the setup). As soon as I arrived, I was given the task of patching in a drum machine. I was told to input it mono initially however, I have set it up for stereo for future use. It was mainly due to the lack of time to patch the console for stereo. With Dante you can patch any channel to the stage rack. I had patched it into 43 and then had to math to figure out the patch on the second rack (as each rack is 32 inputs). I had used a passive DI box (and FOH not knowing the stage sent 48V which I promptly turned off) as it was an active instrument. I then gained it up only after IEM check as it was when I finally had time in soundcheck to gain it correctly. Afterwards I patched it into the correct part of the board so now it is on the same page as the drumkit. I also have it stereo now, but I still need to link those two channels together as I have time when we have practice.
For the Alex Mills recording it went incredibly smoothly. When we had our quick studio planning time, I wrote down all of the microphones and other equipment we wanted. As I was on campus due to a videocall meeting earlier in the morning I collected the equipment so that as soon as everyone arrived, we could set everything up quickly. This worked well as we could set up the Live Room quickly and the line check was quick (and my music taste was exposed to everyone). As soon as Alex arrived it was apparent the trust and respect that he and Guy Gray had. It made the session go easier as I have found from experience that the artist is more patient with you. This meant that by the time that we started recording it only took until the third take for the best performance (though we recorded the fourth as well). I enjoyed this session as it showed how uncomplicated sessions can become once you know how the artist works, and the artist trusts that you know how to work.
With the trailer I spent time in the S6 to help with mixing. I enjoy mixing on Avid’s digital mixers as it gives me the flexibility I enjoy in Pro Tools, especially with automation. I was given feedback that the music in the montage did not match well. I changed it to another part of one of the songs that I had already used. With the automation and level mixing it helped with the fading between the changes in music. I decided to send the music out to some outboard gear. Mainly, because I could, and I thought that the analogue sound could add some nice saturation. I have always had a love/hate relationship with patch bays (mainly hate due to the squinting to read the tiny writing).
The patch bay in this studio is really easy in comparison to others as it is normalised, and I understand all of the patches on this bay. I sent it initially into the FCS P3S ME Mastering Compressor and then the BAX EQ. I gained up the compressor a slight amount and some of the lows with the EQ. I remembered how much I loved how the 32kHz sounded on the Avalons. I then added the Avalons into the chain first to boost at 32kHz. I printed this out and it sounded great apart from this one part where I had time stretched it nearly to artefacts. With the analogue gear it added in the artefacts again, so I took the part from the digital print (which I rendered some of the highs off to keep the artefacts from being heard) and crossfaded them together. I spent most of my session mixing my SFX/Foley session. I did a large amount of automation especially with the Atmos tracks. I also enjoyed using the S6 as it made it easier to turn down a group of tracks, especially the footsteps tracks. By using the digital mixer, I had more freedom to level the clips against each other. Spent another session in the S6 in which I finished off the leveling, editing and printing off the new masters of the music and SFX/Foley sessions. I imported these into my dialogue session which I’m going to use as my master session. I made a Duck AUX to sidechain compression so that the Dialogue can stand out more. I have another session later this week that I will use to finish off mastering.
I have enjoyed this week. I have discovered how far I have come in my work as previously I would take so much longer to do this amount of work. I also have realised how I have grown to use less plugins and instead balance. This took time I instead use plugins more creatively and I enjoy the creative view compared to the restricted view I used to have of them to do their stated job. As I grow in my practise, I enjoy the changes I have made with my mentality to work. With my strict scheduling it allows me the freedom to experiment and grow in my creativity. I used to feel quite uncreative in my work but, I’ve realised I am now that I understand what I am doing and why. I like this change in my mentality.
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