Mix Rescue: Sambasevam Shanmugam
Article Preview :: Mixing & Recording Advice
Technique : Mixing
In working to perfect a Bollywood mix, our engineer found that there were plenty of lessons that could be drawn from it and applied to mixes in most genres.
A
lthough some UK/US musicians still think of ‘Bollywood’ as a typo, it’s actually one of the world’s most popular and commercially lucrative genres — and it demands extremely high production values to achieve its typically slick, glossy sonics. This was an ongoing source of frustration to SOS reader Sambasevam Shanmugam, who’d been told by contacts in the South Indian music industry that even though his self-produced songs were well on target compositionally, his mixes weren’t cutting the mustard. Unsure of how to up his standards, he sent in the song ‘Kaathaadi’ to SOS for some advice. He‘d already identified the main problems: a lack of contrast between sections; unreliable translation to headphones and laptop speakers; and instability in the vocal levels. He’d also struggled to achieve a warm bass sound without overcrowding the mix, and had undercooked the delay and reverb effects overall for fear of washing things out. Plenty to be getting on with... especially since he had a number of productions by Oscar-winning composer A.R Rahman (of Slumdog Millionaire fame) in his sights for referencing purposes!
Guest vocals on this month’s Mix Rescue mix were provided by Gowtham Bharadwaj (above) and Vandana Srinivasan (below).
Photo: Madhana Gopal
Vocal Processing
Because the mix was built around the two lead vocals, and they were both nicely recorded, they required only very gentle processing, as you can see from these screenshots: the male vocal processing is shown on the left, the female vocal processing on the right.
Whenever I receive a new multitrack to work on, I take time to organise, name and colour all the tracks in my DAW so that I can navigate around them instinctively. Listening through the tracks one at a time at the outset of this process frequently helps decide my overall plan of attack for the mix. This project was a case in point, because the moment I heard the quality and expressiveness of the vocal recordings, I was convinced that no effort should be spared in making them the stars of the show, as they really were a pleasure to listen to! I decided to start with the vocals and then build everything else around them, thereby maximising the space for the singers in the mix, and this meant that the vocals themselves received very little processing at all.
Comparing the vocal tones to Sambasevam’s reference tracks, I cut 2.5dB from the male vocal at 170Hz, and gave the female vocal a narrow 3dB cut at 380Hz and a 1dB lift above about 2kHz. As far as dynamics were concerned, the female vocal received 3-5dB of understated opto-compression from Universal Audio’s LA2A plug-in, while the male vocal was treated with a subtle four-band compression patch from Cockos ReaXcomp.
I don’t often use multi-band compression on vocals, but where they’re absolutely in the spotlight it can help bring out details and even out frequency-response variations that otherwise make it difficult to balance the singer against other tracks. The settings involved low (1.2:1) ratios across the board, low thresholds for 1-2dB of gain reduction per band, and crossovers adjusted to suit the characteristics of the vocal tone: the low band up to 350Hz caught the note fundamentals and chest resonances; the 350Hz-3.3kHz low mid-band handled the main pitched harmonics; the 3.3kHz-8.8kHz high mid-band controlled the sibilance region; and the high band dealt with the ‘air’ frequencies (which I couldn’t resist driving a little harder for increased intimacy).
Ring-fencing The Singers
High-frequency EQ on many channels helped to avoid conflicts with the vocals, either by cutting the upper octave (as on the percussion channels with Sonimus SonEQ) to keep the vocal ‘air’ band clear, or by cutting in the 2-6kHz region to push sounds behind the vocals in the mix (as on the cymbal-channel Cockos ReaEQ instance shown).
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Mon 21 May 2012
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985