Written by Terry Doner. January 26 2021.
With the events of the last year, many churches have been thrust into a new world; the world of broadcast. They may have had a good sounding mix in their rooms but find it misses the mark when listening online.
This article outlines a process to evaluate your mix and give some direction to improvements.
There are several dimensions in which to evaluate our work: balance, clarity , presence, width, depth, and height. Ultimately the standard to measure these against is how close the result come to the intent. Different artists and different genres will have different intents. Let's dive in.
For balance we are going to focus on just a few key questions.
Can everything be heard? This doesn't mean everything equal, rather is everything represented in the mix the way you intend? If you are doing a hip-hop style mix, the drums will be very prominent, and for jazz, they will be much more subtle. Volume is not the only tool you have to adjust this. You can adjust the EQ to give instruments their own frequency band in which it can roam. And if creating a stereo mix, you can pan somethings to the left or right.
That is only one question ... ha ha. Maybe the next question is ... are things fighting for attention?
The opposite of clarity is mud and mud is often created by having way to much low end where it should be. Although this is true for your front of house as well, everything is more pronounced in broadcast. They key question, "How is the articulation of every vocal and every instrument"?
Part of the responsibility of this lies with your arranger and musicians as they are producing the content and you as the engineer can only work with what you have given.
Your first tool is mic selection and placement. For example in your room, you might not need to mic your drums but in broadcast if it is not mic'd you likely won't hear it well. Then mic selection and placement allows you to focus the pickup to get just what you want and not so much what your don't want.
EQ is another great tool to fine tune your clarity. The first thing to think about is what can I get rid of? Like Michelangelo, get rid of the things that are superfluous. For example, in a tenor vocal, you can easily use a HPF (high pass filter) to remove everything below 160 Hz, some might suggest even 250 Hz. Experiment as hear what works best. This same sort of practice can apply to just about every source.
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” ― Michelangelo
Presence is sometimes discussed as a style of EQ which boost the mid range frequencies. That is only part of the topic. More generally it is a feeling of how close the performance is to you. Is it right in your head? Or on the other side of the room?
There are several tools you can use to control the presence: Eq, Stereo width, compression, saturation.
When we talk about the depth of the mix, we are using terms like 'out in front' and 'in the back' of the mix. These spatial terms describe the relative loudness of the musicians. We might say, "the lead vocal is out in front with the backup vocals tucked in behind, etc". This structure does tend to follow genre specific formulas - and with all such formulas or rules, once you know them, break them ;)
Not many live venues has a stereo (real stereo) installation. It is hard and expensive to do well for a large group of people. But for your broadcast mix it is a lot easier because your audience is likely a collection of small groups of people and they may even be watching your broadcast on a home theatre system.
If you have a system that can produce a stereo mix for your broadcast then use it! This allows you to spread some (and not all) of your instruments and vocals across the sonic image for your audience which creates space for their performance.
You do need to be careful because for some people they may be listening on devices that combine the stereo left and right into a mono signal and you still want that to sound good for them too. When you start working in stereo, you need to monitor in both mono and stereo.
One of the most common problems with online mixes is that they are too loud or not loud enough. This can be further complicated if you program contains a variety of content: from quiet talking to energetic music. The difference between the loudest segments and the quietest segments is the dynamic range of your program. Unlike your live venue, where you have full control of the sound environment, you don't have any control over the listening environment. In general you need to assume that your listeners do not have the same dynamic range. A well designed auditorium could be capable of 50db of useful range or more. A car on the highway might be limited to 10db.
Your distribution network (YouTube, Facebook, etc) are aware of these DR limits and process you audio so that their listeners aren't always reaching for the volume knob.
https://www.voxengo.com/product/span/
https://youlean.co/youlean-loudness-meter/
https://www.tcelectronic.com/product.html?modelCode=P0D9L
https://www.tcelectronic.com/broadcast-standards.html
By now you have a better opinion of what is good and not so good about your mix. There are some things you can do to build your skills. ... ear training... listen ... skills training... learn your gear.
mxu sound check https://mxu.rocks/soundcheck/
rick beato's what makes this song great
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9B0aiM7ryfXV_
mxu https://mxu.rocks/
https://www.churchsoundbootcamp.com/
practice
church sound university https://churchsoundu.thinkific.com/
https://worshipministryschool.com/church-sound-course
https://www.youtube.com/c/academyav - has a lot of good and short videos on "Audio Theory"
https://www.northbrightonrecording.co.uk/uploads/1/4/5/2/14526468/evaluating_your_song_mix.pdf
https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/10-tell-tale-signs-of-an-amateur-mix-make-yours-pro
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/listen-learn-analysing-commercial-mixes