Session Notes
Article Preview :: Selwyn Jazz Part II:Mixing A Jazz Big Band Recording
Last month, we recounted our experiences of tracking a jazz big band on location. Now we explain what it takes to turn the raw multitracks into a nicely polished production.
This month’s Session Notes column picks up where last month’s left off: having recorded the big band Selwyn Jazz (pictured) on location, and having subsequently edited the results, we now discuss the mixdown process.
In last month’s ‘Session Notes’, Hugh Robjohns and Matt Houghton helped SOS reader Myles Eastwood to capture Cambridge University’s Selwyn Jazz big band on location, providing many useful practical insights into large-scale ensemble recording. If you missed that, you can read that article on the SOS web site at www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec12/articles/session-notes-1212.htm. This month, I’m going to pick up where Hugh and Matt left off, and demonstrate how such a recording might be approached at the mixdown stage.
Unlike many of the mix projects I receive, Hugh had carefully edited and consolidated his multitracks as a set of sensibly named 24-bit WAV files, and he’d also supplied a range of notes about the tracking process, including details of mic choices and placements. This made arranging the tracks within my Cockos Reaper-based mix system a no-brainer, so I was off to a flying start within about 10 minutes of breaking the DVD-ROM out of its jiffy bag.
The Horn Section: Building From The Room Mics
Hugh’s careful consolidation and naming of the multitrack left nothing to chance, which meant Mike’s DAW mix project was up and running in minutes.
Faced with any acoustic multitrack, I almost always make a bee-line for the room mics. Because these usually deliver the most natural tone for each of the instruments (albeit typically with lots of room ambience), relying heavily on these mics often helps make the ensemble more believable. Consequently, I immediately knew the odds were in my favour when, upon opening up these channels, I was greeted with a nicely balanced brass timbre. There was a certain amount of reverberant bass/kick spill, as is to be expected on loud live sessions, but this was easy enough to tackle with high-pass filters. I investigated the trumpet and trombone mics next, because the saxophones were slightly favoured by the frontal room-mic positioning, and I figured these channels might help redress this. All three were commendably free of sax spill, so all was well on that front, although a side-effect of the necessarily close, on-axis mic positioning was a tonal brightness that required some shelving cut above about 3kHz to mellow.
The remaining brass mics seemed promising enough, though, so I quickly filtered out unwanted LF spill from each mic in turn and panned everything relative to the room mics. For the saxes, I went with similar imaging, but I chose to widen the trumpets and trombones to match them a little more closely to the saxes. Polarity checks proved little more than a formality on this session, and the only brass mic that seemed marginally nicer-sounding inverted was the high trumpet mic, quite possibly on account of the phase shift introduced by my shelving EQ.
The necessarily close mic placements on the trumpets and trombones led to an over-bright tone, but this was quickly remedied with a fairly simple EQ. Notice also the high-pass filtering used on both these instruments (and, indeed, on all the other instrument channels) to reduce the levels of bass spill in the mix as a whole.
Time to grab some faders! My initial aim was to use the spot mics to inject detail and presence into the basic room-mic ensemble sound, although I was also aware of the need to return the trumpets and trombones to a more equal footing with the saxes. Pretty early on, I decided that I would employ a little bit of smoke and mirrors by delaying the room mics by about 10ms, to slightly increase the apparent size of the recording room. In addition, I refined my rough-and-ready preliminary EQ choices as the more extended listening process began to sensitise my ears to which fader settings felt most secure. For example, I noticed that bringing either the alto or tenor sax mics to an apparently satisfactory level (in terms of overall audibility) seemed to overpower the mix’s lower mid-range, whereas a similarly appropriate subjective level for the high trumpet and trombone mics left this frequency zone rather anaemic. In response, I therefore made 3dB cuts at 415Hz and 335Hz respectively for each of the saxes, boosted by 3.5dB below 775Hz on the high trumpets, and added a broad 1.5dB peak at 375Hz on the trombones.
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Wed 22 May 2013
Sound On Sound : Est. 1985