You gotta love live sound

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You have to love it for various reasons. Although many have a love-hate relationship with it, there are many things we can learn from it, and it’s even more true if we are partly working in it. Of course I’m somewhat biased because although in full time I’m a post-production engineer I continue to work in live sound in a freelance basis. I gathered some of my experiences that may help post guys in achieving better results, because like it or not, although it is vastly different from post work it is still an adjacent industry working with sound.

You won’t find many similarities in these jobs but I’m certain that each can learn a few things from the other, even if someone really hate live sound. Probably these profoundly different workflows and situations give the real means that can help us to develop very useful skills in the other part of the industry.

Make decisions and stick to them

Probably the biggest advantage one can learn from some live sound work is how to make decisions in tough environments. Amidst the often frantic tempo of live sound gigs you simply won’t have time to contemplate on things. Your aim is to rapidly find the best solution even if you don’t have all the necessary information, even if the information you have is not accurate or not detailed enough. No one will wait for your well thought-out plans, and if you don’t want to make many people furious, you should really try hard to put things into the proper order.
But wait, how can I make such good decisions if the information I get is inaccurate?
Well, that’s the hard part which gets better if you gain more and more experience but only if you really pour yourself into the process. The plan don’t have to be dead accurate, but must be plausible.

The point is to learn to make serious decisions based on very incomplete information. How is it helping you in the post world?

It helps you to be very focused yet still very open minded about the upcoming problems you might encounter for example during a mix session. Obviously you won’t always have the right answer for the given problem, but as you gradually getting better in this decision making process, your success rate will go up.

Adopt, adapt and improve

Just as the famous scene from Monthy Python. I know it may sound confusing, but you have to be able to drop your plan at the right moment. I know that a few lines above I just suggested to make a decision and stick with it, and it’s true. But it’s equally important to develop your 6th sense and realise if something is not working or won’t work, so you need another solution. In this scenario if you cling to the wrong plan, you can ruin your chances very quickly. It’s really a double-edged sword. On one hand you need to make decisions and try to stick to them, on the other hand you should never forget the possibility that you might have chosen the wrong path. In this case the best solution is to throw out your bad plan, and as quickly as possible, choose another solution which would seem to work in the given situation.

I know it’s a bit vague, maybe even daunting, but in reality it’s not rocket science. If I want to really simplify this I would say: learn to be sober in frantic situations and learn to recognise and correct your own mistakes. That’s it. In my experience live sound is a very good learning field for this.

However quick shouldn’t mean rushed. When you’re in a tough situation which need to be solved immediately and you surrounded by sleep deprived, testy, nervous people, try to stay calm and focused. It’s easier to say than to do it, but again, with some practice you’ll become better at this. How can this really be any help in the post world?

In my experience every director, sound supervisor, etc. become more confident in your work if you remain calm and constructive even amongst the biggest challenges. Obviously this does not mean that you don’t care, quite the opposite: you must care enough to develop this skill so you can solve, or at least suggest possible solutions for the given problems.

Don’t afraid to fail

Again, live sound is probably the perfect training ground for this. Anyone who did many shows know that sometimes we fail. Maybe we have a very bad day, or the PA is horrible, or the venue is a nightmare and you don’t have enough time for soundcheck. At some point in your path, you’ll fail. The show will go on, you’ll feel very bad about it, but I suggest you to get used to it, or at least don’t be afraid of failing. This is very important. It’s never about your own ego. It’s about the gig, show, film, fx, production, etc. If you’re not willing to leave your ego at the door, than you’ve chosen the wrong industry doesn’t matter if it’s live or post sound.

No matter how big cliche: learn from your mistakes or fails. The question is not that how can you eschew any mistake, but how you treat them or what you learn from them. Honesty is the best here. Even if someone ridicules you for it. The worst possible strategy is try to hide, deny your fault or try to lay the blame on somebody else.

“My ego comes pre-shrunk”
Randy Thom

Be fast

Learn to be a fast pace operator. In order to efficiently solve problems or able to do a full sound check rapidly, you need to be technically prepared. If you struggle with the console, constantly adjust the wrong channel because you forgot to select the right one, you’ll be in a very bad position. This is very, very important in post production too. Learn the tools. If the equipment you try to use is an obstacle, then you need more practice. I realise that no one can know everything, but as in every job, there are basics, special workflows, shortcuts, general system knowledge. If you lack at some areas here, try to improve them “offline”. Even if it seems bitterly boring, practice even basic things until you feel that you would execute the task no matter what may happen around you.

It’s like language. If anyone try to learn a foreign language, there is a point where the person’s active vocabulary is smaller than the passive one. So while I understand an article for example, cannot eloquently tell the story to others, because my active vocabulary lacks. What should I do then? Practice, practice and practice. It’s the same in the audio world. Simply put, it’s not enough if you heard about Pro Tools, you must be able to operate it. And you won’t be able to operate it properly if you only tried it once or twice.

Remember it’s fun

Never ever forget that this job is tremendous fun. Really! Despite all the hard things, all the sleep deprivation and long hours. Consider these things:

  • you always learn new things
  • meet new people (clients, colleagues)
  • work on funny, serious, evocative, good, etc. material
  • you can be creative (actually you must be!)
  • always challenged so you won’t be ever bored

These are just a few highlights because there are so many it would fill multiple long blog posts. Grit is what makes you better day by day. Stick with the upcoming problems, put effort into the solutions and it will be good fun and a real good learning experience too. At least in my opinion of course.

Templates part 2

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Last time I wrote about the necessary brain work behind creating a really helpful template, now I would like to share the simple method of doing it in Pro Tools. So the time has come when the well thought out blueprint come to fruition.

Step by step

If you really done your homework then this part is much easier, because it only requires some Pro Tools knowledge. The hard part is over. Consider this as some finger practice.

New session

Create a new session just as you would if you’d start a new project.

newsession

Let’s add some tracks. Instead of repeatedly open the new track dialogue window use your paper to count how many and what types of channels you need. This way you only encounter this window once. Don’t bother with anything else, just create as many audio (stereo and mono), aux, VCA and other tracks you need.

newtrack

At this point you can choose between two paths. Name the created tracks, or first make the routing. I prefer to name the tracks first. Some find it little complicated because at this point you cannot see any hint from the in-out part of the channel, but again, if your plan is accurate then it cannot be a problem. Select all tracks, right-click, select rename. This way you just need to type the names, hit enter and PT automatically skips to the next track’s name window.

When you’re ready, let’s make the routing. It can be done from multiple locations in Pro Tools but I highly recommend to use the Setup/I/O setup. It’s faster and much easier to see the logical building blocks of your session. Name everything!
When we get familiar with the session we will remember easily what bus we put the reverb send, but believe me, you don’t want to test your memory during a creative compose, edit or mix session. The template session should help you, not test you, so give a proper name to all the buses you make. It’s easier to route pretty much anything if it has a name.

iosetup

You can use some useful naming conventions if you like:

  •  x=prefix for effects: xRoom means Room effect
  •  b=prefix for bus: bDrums or bDIA means drum bus or dialogue bus
  •  v= prefix for VCA: vFX means VCA master for effects
  •  etc.

You can even invent some prefix, the main point is it should be clear to you what the particular “code” mean. Don’t overcomplicate, use something simple and understandable.

tracknamesprefix

There are many different naming schemes floating around. The point is to use one which you clearly understand and stick with it, don’t change it from session to session. It’s not mandatory to use any of these schemes but can be useful later as your session grows. This way it doesn’t matter how big your session is, you can identify the track types from the prefixes.

At this stage you shall have a pretty good starting point, now it’s time to insert some plugins. Remember, it’s only a template, you can change it anytime you want or need to. The concept is that when you use the template it should contain all the necessary ingredients which you need to do great work. So don’t be shy here, put in as many plugins as you possibly need. First, you can change it later, second, you can always bypass the ones you don’t need at the moment. Use channel strips, comps, eqs, distortion, etc. and don’t forget to “plugin up” your auxes. Insert multiple reverbs or delays or any other effect you like.

See? You’ve got your tracks, routing, plugins, effects. Almost done. You can stop here if you want but I suggest to go further than this.

The premium stuff

If you are patient or curious enough, I share some additional tips to enhance your already splendid templates a bit further. These things are absolutely optional, if you like, you can implement them into your workflow. It may require a bit of learning, but in my opinion it is very useful.

1

Saved zoom presets. Probably you already know that you can save four zoom positions and recall them by 1–4 on the keyboard. Generate a short sample of sine wave or pink noise and make your zoom presets so that are precisely suit your needs in every session you create from the template.
To create a zoom preset, simply zoom in or out, and if you like the current state, hit cmd+the chosen number.

zoompresets

2

Window configurations and markers. For example you have your effects set up, ready to go, but I’m sure that they’ll need some additional tweak here or there. Make a window config that will show your effects on screen. Window configurations are recallable by markers so this can be a very efficient and fast method. Window/Configurations/New configuration

3

The third idea directly comes from post production. Make some comment track. You can leave it blank. The purpose? You won’t clutter your marker list with additional comments. On the dummy/comment track you can create clip groups and use the clip group’s name as your comment field. It is very practical as you can have as many as you want, place them anywhere in the session.

commenttrack

The last step is to save your session as template.

saveastemplate

So, you’re ready with the best template you could possibly imagine, the last step is the real payoff: use it, work from it. If you were really meticulously followed the steps, this is a real dream template which would help you immensely to speed up your workflow and get the job done with less effort.

Templates part 1

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When you start and have to learn many things about a new DAW, let’s say in this case Pro Tools, don’t make templates. When you’re getting good, know Pro Tools much better, then start to make templates to make your life easier and your work faster.

Why not?

First it may seem a good idea to start out with templates. It’s faster, the chance of error is less, you’ve got ready to go things at your hands in the first minute. And that’s a good thing. Well, in my opinion, it may not. If you just start out, it’s better to learn the hard way, to always start from scratch so you really understand the structures, methods and workflows. If you try to skip the hard part, you’ll regret later. Nothing is more dangerous than a building with flimsy foundation. I know it’s tempting, but if you’re really serious about learning Pro Tools or any other DAW, don’t choose the easiest way. You really need to fail multiple times so that the process will be your second nature while you’ll succeed.

When and why?

When you’re getting good, knowing the basics, know some shortcuts and you hardly need to stop when you’re building a bigger session from scratch, then it’s time to delve into and make some templates. Templates makes your progress happen faster as almost everything can be set up when you want to start to edit or mix. If you build a really good mix template, then you only need to import the incoming audio into your session created from your template and start working immediately without the need to set up additional things. This is a huge timesaver.

How to start with it?

I recommend to grab a clean sheet of paper and plan your session template before the first mouse click. It may sound ridiculous, but believe me first you must know what your needs are, and only after this come the real building part. If you start before this learning process then you’ll have a half-baked session template with things that constantly need some tweak here or there. Even if you precisely know what you want, you may encounter a few errors in your own template which need some minor tweak, but after some short test period, you’ll have a very precise, dependable starting point.

Don’t underestimate! The worst thing you can do is to build a small template which always need some addition to it in order to really serve you. This is why I seriously recommend the planning on paper method. Ponder about how many effects you need, buses, VCAs, stereo and mono channels, etc. When you’re sure that you didn’t left anything out, wait a bit and start to investigate the almost perfect plan for possible errors and things you might left out by accident. Remember, it is always better to have few very good templates than to have so many you lose control over it and neither one is perfect for the given job.

So, the workflow may look like this:

  • brainstorm (piece of paper, write down everything you might need)
  • write or draw a kind of flowchart so you can see what is there and why
  • pondering on what could possibly be missing
  • add, subtract, revise after careful consideration
  • pause for a minute to really think it over
  • now you can start Pro Tools and start building your session template
  • test your template for every possible things (routing, effects, stems, layout, etc.)
  • modify if necessary
  • test it again until it’s really ready to serve you

Next, we’ll take a look at the real-world method of how to build a template.

Ruler-flat faders

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Time to time this question/observation comes up on different audio forums, or someone ask another guy about this, or sometimes I get emails about this. Is it good or bad practice? What’s the idea behind it? Is it just a game? Or some weird habit? Questions like these emerge. I saw guys who swears that it is the only method, heard others who ridicule it.

As it seems to be, this is one of the dark spots of mixing, I’ll try to shed some light on it. But first things first, let’s see what it is. After the soundcheck, raw mix, pre-mix, pre-dub, etc. you see this on the console or control surface.

rulerflat faders

Everything at unity, not even a millimetre below or above. How does it make sense? Well, there are multiple answers for this. If you see this for example in a live sound environment and then see the guy mixing with the gains to adjust his/her mix, than it’s simply a bad habit, or if you like twitter, it’s a #mixfail. Faders are there for us to help adjust, massage the levels inside the mix and as we have more than one fingers we can adjust multiple channels/groups at once. I don’t think it’s necessary to explain why it is good.

On the other hand, there’s logical explanation for the “ruler-flat faders”. When you begin a mix, be it live or post mix, music or for picture it is definitely a good idea to adjust everything so if your faders are at unity (ruler-flat) then you have a good starting point. This is the point of this whole thing. With all faders at unity, you have a good raw mix, pre-dub, etc.

  • If you have to send the session into any other place in the World, they open it, and can start to do their mixing job right away. With faders at unity, they don’t have to do anything, able to start automation, trimming, anything, but first of all, listening to the mix, they have a good starting point.
  • In live sound, after the often frantic sound check, you have ample room to go below or above unity, but at the ruler-flat state you should have a pretty good mix already

I don’t say that this is the only method to follow or even the right one, but still, I hope with this in mind it at least makes sense why so many people doing this way.

Some thoughts on the upcoming Pro Tools 11

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Anger, frustration, trolling, baseless bashing, rare real critic, hype, amusement, excitement. If I want to summarise the last few weeks about Pro Tools 11 in one sentence. Of course we better get used to the fact that we unlikely to see any new products which wouldn’t generate the same diverse response. This post reflects my own opinions.

First of all, it never cease to amaze me that many already bashing a software which is basically not exist yet. Yes, we saw the announcement, know that it will come, but let’s be honest for a moment, the vast majority of us have no idea how good or bad it’ll be. The only thing we know that it is supposed to be a amazing upgrade. Let’s see some of the new features.

Features

  • Offline bounce: the long awaited feature, which honestly doesn’t make a big difference at all (at least for me). Don’t get me wrong, it is a very useful thing and I can see that I would use here or there, but honestly I am not that brave to hand out a final mix without listen to it from start to end realtime! And honestly with all due respect I don’t know any serious professional who would… So while I agree it’s a nice feature which can help us to make certain things much faster, it’s far from being the most important thing. For many of us, the good destructive record to track still has many advantages over offline bounce.
  • 64bit architecture. Now this is a much more important thing in my opinion. Hopefully gone are the days when we get memory related error messages, not to mention occasional crashes with huge sessions.
  • New video engine. Oh I prayed for this one. Cannot really comment on this until I try it, but I’m very glad they reworked it, or imported it (from Mediacomposer).
  • Metering, gain reduction meter, etc. Although it’s not breakthrough I consider these as highly supportive features. I’m sure I’ll like these
  • New audio engine. Glad they ditched DAE forever. It was high time to do it and make some serious effort to build one from scratch.
  • Only AAX. Honestly I don’t really want to say/write anything about this. We know till Pro Tools 10 has been released. No argument here as I take this as inevitable.

Avidaae

Efficiency, speed and power

For me the biggest promise is that compared to Pro Tools 10, on the very same machine we’ll get much more power with Pro Tools 11. Of course we don’t have any tangible proof of this, but if it’s true, I’ll upgrade. I know that the supported or recommended computer list is somewhat narrower than before, but remember that at Avid if something is not on the list, it does not mean it won’t work. They cannot possibly test every configuration.

For a short example, I daily use Pro Tools HD 10 on a dual i5 MacBook Pro which is not supported, still working rock solid even with big sessions. I don’t encourage anyone to use computers which are not in the Avid list, though you should know that there are laptops and desktops that works flawlessly with PT10, without any Avid qualification. For the record, the main rigs are all supported machines, but frankly many times I use not supported machines at different places, and they’re perfectly working. My experience based on mainly Apple computers regarding this.

I wonder how much more power we’ll get, as a few weeks ago I had to finish a mix on my laptop (i5 dual-core MBP) and the whole session ran smoothly. The session comprised of 134 tracks, 8 effects (reverbs, delays, etc.), 42 buses, about 160+ plugins, including eq, comp., tape saturation, etc. This was not a small mix session but the little laptop handled it. I don’t say that with ease, but without errors, about 60 % cpu load. At the end I recorded the stems into the same session with destructive record.

Upgrade path

Recently Tim Prebble wrote an excellent summary about the possibilities/needs of our future computer rigs and I couldn’t agree more with him. Take the example above. That is only a small laptop, nothing really special about it, yet it handles a mix large enough to “kill” even a few years old tower. And this is only a dual-core i5. Now you can buy for example a Mac mini server with quad-core i7, 16GB of ram, etc. It’s already powerful enough to handle a really large super-session with loads of tracks, plugins and stems in the very same session. So the question is very valid: do we need the huge workstation towers?

I agree there’s a market for those too, but I’m not really convinced that audio, even audio post production would need them. I very well know the advantages come with a dedicated tower, but if you just think it over and calculate a bit, you might end up with multiple Mac minis (just for the sake of a example), some Sonnet expansion, and you spent half the money, yet has more than enough power at your disposal. All this with the probability that PT11 will be much more efficient than PT10 could ever be.

One thing where the big towers has enormous advantage is serviceability and expandability. I’d been building computers for many years and know that how easy and painless a memory or hdd upgrade/change can be with a proper tower. These things are much more complicated in a laptop or in Mac minis, not to mention the the iMacs. But if we consider the price difference, we may face a quite easy decision as from the price of a Macpro, you can buy 4 Mac minis, or two with the Sonnet expansion box. With this you also has some backup if something goes wrong. I’m not completely against the huge towers, but honestly at this point I cannot see why I would choose that upgrade path. Of course anything can happen.

Summary

So, what is my plan? I am certain that I will upgrade to Pro Tools 11, probably as soon as it will come out, as it can co-exist with PT10 on the same machine. On the computer side though, I’m not sure I am interested in a new MacPro anymore. And I’m very determined, because these minis/laptops and other little machines are not only “good for the money” or “good enough for my needs”, but they are already powerful enough for serious work. In the long term (like with the Sonnet box) it’s makes more sense to replace the Mac mini than to buy huge and pricey towers again and again.