The best of Bob Olhsson's writings and tour info

Overmixing can be a problem. Many a ruff has turned out to be the master.

There are two distinct schools of thought on bus compression. I think of mixing into a compressor as the SSL/New York school and without as the more traditional Midwest or west coast school.

Mixing into a compressor speeds up mixing and working fast can definitely improve one’s decisions. The downside is that it can hype the underlying musical balance into sounding OK only on the speakers you were listening to while mixing.

The main thing is keeping your attention on the musical goal which is people having an enjoyable experience with the recording in any listening environment.

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There’s really nothing sacred about aggressive mix buss processing.

Starting out with overall eq. on the mix buss and then tweaking the channel eqs can sound a lot better and more “glued” than just using the channel eqs., especially when mixing on a console.

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The biggest challenge in audio production is the fact that we tend to hear less and imagine more with every listening.
This, by the way, is why there can be no such thing as “self-mastering.”

A real trap for experienced musicians is that they tend to be satisfied when they can hear everything, it’s all in tune and rhythmically together.
This is often achieved at the expense of both character and focused communication with the listeners who are mostly non-musicians.

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To me MultiBand Compressors have a way of quickly moving the sound into a place where it only sounds good in the very same room where the multiband was set up.

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on compressors
One size never fits all!

The best is having a variety and setting up level-matched comparisons to figure out which option (including “bypass”) sounds best. I’ve been surprised over and over.

The two classic PT crunchiness problems are clipping plug-ins and not dithering to 24 bits.

I’ve had several clients run their mixes again with the stereo or surround dithered mixer plug-in replacing the default or some kind of 24 bit dither on the output master fader of PTle and the low level hash went away. Its too bad PT doesn’t just default to having 24 bit dither enabled.

A real problem is the popularity of powered monitors. Many of these have limiters built in that can mask distortion from other sources.

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Bit reduction is taking place if there is any modification to the audio whatsoever.

Dither keeps the sound from becoming crunchy when the bits beyond what can be written are truncated. It prevents distortion much like adding high frequency bias to analog tape does. It ought to not even be an option and isn’t in high end digital gear.

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24 bit dither sometimes matters and sometimes does not.

I dither le to 24 bits using a plug-in such as Ozone 3 or L-1. I also mix back into a stereo track rather than bouncing. That way I can compare mixes with the input monitor or even punch into a mix if I’m in a hurry and hear a problem. It also allows comping mixes for those having the fortitude to nit-pick that much.

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Every time I’ve heard a difference, le was the winner assuming the output was dithered to 24 bits.

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Having enough guts to leave a great mix alone is pretty important.

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Eyes Before Ears Except After See?

Where to begin?…

At Motown, we often covered the meters. Tommy Dowd at Atlantic took the meters out and painted over the front panel of every piece of gear in his control room with flat black paint!

The first day I worked as a motion picture post intern my boss did a demo of some concert footage. He had two mixes, one provided by the record label done by one of the top “name” mixers and a second he had mixed while watching the edited picture on a big screen. It was amazing, the minute you turned the picture off, the record mix killed his mix to picture. The minute you turned the picture back on, his mix absolutely left the record mix in the dust. Do we need a moving Pro Tools screen shot to accompany contemporary pop music mixes?

The problem is that the folks who are considering buying a record are NOT looking at a ProTools screen. They don’t care that the drum images line up on a grid. There is no way in hell this stuff is helping to sell records. Just try to sing along and then check out what it feels like to sing along with a Roy Orbison hit. We’re really talking about the most primal factors in music coming up short. This, in my opinion, is a way way bigger deal than most folks in the industry are willing to admit to themselves.

My stepson is a huge hip-hop fan. He works on a camera crew and recently finished a documentary about Willie Nelson. Hearing Willie sing in the flesh with just a guitar, no PA and nothing electric has turned him into a huge Willie Nelson fan.

Music has great power when people get to experience it with no technology screwing things up.

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Below added 17.5.2010

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There’s a really basic concept about this that needs to be understood. The critical bands or auditory filters correspond to little hair cells in the inner ear. Each of us is physically different and the hair cells are also subject to damage.

In other words, we probably each hear things quite differently. We have around one octave of maximum sensitivity but which one can vary by another octave. The same is true of how things sound at different volume levels.

A recent study suggests that our hearing acts somewhat like a two band compressor with everything above 300 to 800 Hz., depending on the individual, being compressed and everything below not being compressed. You can actually hear this as you turn the volume up and down and this is why it’s really important to make certain that musical balances in a mix hold up at a variety of different volume levels.

Understanding a bit about hearing is very helpful but never forget that it is always a moving target. In fact folks having hearing damage tend, in my experience, to be more sensitive to things like distortion, MP3s or lack of dithering than those of us who don’t have much hearing damage.

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compressing drums ?(why)

That’s what I keep asking myself!

I’ve done it so many times and then when I’ve got the whole mix happening, I’ll take it off, correct the level of the drum bus and half the time the whole mix sounds lots better with just eq. on the drum bus.

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The most common mistake is not enough vocal.

We know that radio is going to crush our mixes. Minimizing the damage is largely a matter of eq. and balance. If you listen both with and without heavy limiting while you mix, you can find proportions that will remain in balance both while limited and with the limiting turned off. Also clipping is to be avoided because broadcast processors will reduce the average level of clipped material.

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