Love your posts, and your humble and humorous approach to music education. This is very generous of you so thank you. You make it look easy but that's because your a pro. Very fun, very classy and down to earth. Well done ! your a big help! Best Ed
Btw - stunning set-up that you have! I see a Slate Digital Raven right in front of you, and I've counted 4 (?) Mac screens, including one wall-mounted! Wow!!
Hello Guy! This is, of course, a brilliant introduction, and just what I need, but it begs a first question: if the sound from the main mics is so good, why go further? It's what the conductor hears, and presumably he has to be happy before we get to this stage. I guess that might be what the next episodes might be about, but it would be good to have an overview of the whole process up front.
The tree mic was developed by Decca in the 50s, after years of mono recording and then stereo experimentation. The engineers found that although they’d try different stuff, the “Christmas” decca tree just worked best. Then they added outriggers for a richer stereo image and orchestral detail. Spot mics are usually used for greater detail, or rather “bigger than life” sound. Same for ambience, which captures and often exaggerates the hall. Your choice of mics depends mainly on the style you want to compose in, and on the featured soloists. But keep in my mind that the great composers didn’t have mic positions in mind… only orchestration!
Man, I wish you could be my teacher! I have been wanting to become a music composer since I was 10 years old. I would love nothing more than to be able to make music for film.
You can! Check out this, he teaches there online: thinkspaceeducation.com There are short courses too, that anyone can take and postgraduate degrees, that are not just affordable and time friendly, but you can enroll them with any BA degree actually!
Wonderful. What surprises me (and probably shouldn't) is how much bleed there is between tracks/instruments. Makes it feel very alive. I wonder, is there a way to simulate this bleed with samples?
I use a whole bunch of free libaries. Unfortunately they don't have a very big sound, you can't set the mics, and nearly all of them have this curve that begins very heavily in low mids and ends very low in high mids. But after watching this video, I might try to recreate the mic positioning you explained with eq's and send levels
I concur! I know there are lots on here that just focus on the attention and making money...and that is important to a degree...but you can tell you sincerely love what you do....I tell people all the time...music chooses you not the other way around and that's the difference between technicians and players and actual musicians! that's not an ego statement by no means and not knocking anyone's joy they get from music in any way! ...to me there is just a very specific difference on the inside :) most of the time it's tortures'! LOL and those who understand what I'm saying know exactly what I mean! LOL but I agree with ED...well done and a ton of bloody content! Cheers Lad!!! truly enjoy your channel! and thank you for sharing your skills and heart with all of us! all the best!!
This is fascinating and you make it sound very straightforward. I always wondered how the music I listen to is mixed to achieve that lovely wide sound BUT without using Stereo wideners. I have one question (I am a novice keep that in mind); I absolutely understand the Tree versus close and ambient mic positions however how did you pull just the Surround and Outrigger tracks? It is probably on your course of which I am about to go and look at and probably purchase. Perhaps you take every instrument and mix them down with an "outrigger" or "surround" option from the Plugin, then do the same with the Tree option and then mix them all together. That makes sense, I just want to know how you do the Outrigger and Surround mix output :) thanks again.
Selling used small tropical island; upgrading to superior model. Excellent conditions, always kept in the studio, non smoker. Photos available only to those showing genuine interest. Bonus helicopter for glasses-of-doubt wearers.
Very strange! We had some funny audio problems (ironically) that we spotted while putting this video out, but the show must go on! So we'll troubleshoot and eliminate all the hardware interference in time for our next video :)
Ive never had that problem but then I suppose that's what studio engineers are there to sort out before I turn up! When mixing I never hear phase problems but its a good question - I'll ask the engineer at the next session qwe're doing for or master's students in June
it's that time difference and slight phase that gives you a greater sense of space so that close mics bring out the attack and far mics highlight the reverb. Some cheap sessions such as the 99$ orchestra will show up with stems often not aligned very well and more then often, just nudging them a bit will make them more useable. I record our community orchestra every week and test out different mic techniques and find the common 3M distances very useful. Having far mics come in at the exact same time as close mics tho will always create more phasing problems. But if recorded properly, or just without adjusting, they will come in just a fraction of a second later and should support the closer mics much better. Try playing with the sample delay or sliding some tracks around, it can yield some interesting results, especially for horror soundtracks and we might want the listener to feel uncomfortable, go ahead and slide half of the mics out 2 milliseconds or so to unphase... lol
Thanks Scott. My thinking is that the source is being recorded at differing 'listening' positions and then mixed to one listening position. Perhaps some libraries are pre-adjusted for that?
Most are designed to be an option for their natural recorded hall reverb so that a slight delay to hit your speakers with the far away mics is usually not a bad thing. No, I don't think they are pre-adjusted to line back up, not from the ones I've herd anyway. Reverb tails wouldn't be as accurate like that. There is also a trick to have microphones the exact same distance away and use shotgun mics for the (close) mics and above the players and then regular cardiod mics on the tree at the exact same time difference but yielding also the different listening experiences of close and far. Some sample libraries like some of the kirk hunter ones even have an option to adjust the start time of second set of mics giving a really cool option to make things thicker or tighter.
Hi - When i go to the page and enter my email address then press the button the browser says that address is not available, like a nonexistent URL. This is on FireFox and Chrome.
Update: I renamed my Windows Hosts file and could get it! The Hosts file is a list of domains and preferred IP addresses, I have a list of every ad server on the planet pointed to 127.0.0.0.
Hi - just finished my 7th feature film (composer and conductor) and I'm working with an audio engineer. What can I take to our mixing/mastering sessions that will help make the orchestra (yes, a live orchestra) sound great for our film??
Mic positions aren't a feature of a certain DAW. They are built into plugins, like the orchestral libraries. The sampled instruments were recorded with these different mic positions, so that you can blend them to your taste. :)
Hello, I wanted to ask you a question about the monitor, mix movie orchestra music, are Yamaha hs7 or ns10 better for it? And what's better for mixing music? I have seen a lot of different opinions on the internet and that is why I am interested in something else. I have yet to buy monitors but I don't know exactly which one for this genre. Otherwise the studio will be in some mediocre room.
If you have several types of sounds that Such as V1 short sounds and V1 Legato, how do you join them as one line in scoring? I keep ending up with two lines. One for each track.
Hello Guy! I must say, I spent years!! trying to get this real sound, I mean...no exactly the sounds comes out off the box like Spitfire Audio stuff, which is excellent...but, not enough to get that sound of the demos you can listening in the web page. It's something I told them (and I got a very kind response from Spitfire Audio (Sandy), who explained than this libraries (in the demos page!! ) are processed as usual by EQ, compression and a final reverb to glue all the sounds... I say this cos I checked almost all variables mixing the 3 mic positions (awesome) but even I watched the Jake Jackson and yourself videos about sending to Altiverb favorite presets and VSS 3 reverbs, I can't get the same sound on demos (very close to John Williams scoring stages sound... Testing with Lexicon PCM lexicon random hall, Exponential audio, Eareckon and now, my favorite, QL Spaces, I am very close to get it...It's a balance between 3 depths (distances) pre-delay times and EQ, as many years ago Mr Kaufmann explained about VSL dry libraries, but it doesn't works with Spitfire Audio really... You should fell de reverb, but not their presence ! (difficult to explain) ...I think is triying to achieve all instruments in that same room blending them with other more dry libraries to sound like this : soundcloud.com/frederickruss/1-thomas-j-bergersen-mojo-madness But, THANK YOU!!! Thank you to explain this and give us the tracks to check!!
Thomas is probably the best in the world at this and it takes a great deal of time to get a sound like that, more time than most of us have when scoring a project so the bar for the trailer people and sound library demos is much higher than most people would achieve on a film cue for example. It's interesting you found that on Frederick's soundcloud page - he's very good at this as well. I should know - he recently graduated from our Master's programme!
I've learnt to use it recently - Im not using it all the time but I needed to understand it so I could help the students basically. We're doing a load of logic tutorials for template in a weekend.
So is this mini course behind a paywall now? I don’t seem to be able to find it despite having registered my email address on the website and followed the subsequent links.
Hey! Don't know if you found the answer yet, but the e-mail links you to the first video of the course. From there, you can edit the URL to view the rest. Maybe that course got broken with the site update or something...
thank you so much for these amazing videos sir ^^ i would like to ask about Mic positions in samples, when making an orchestral tracks ( just strings for an instance) should one use different mic positions for each instrument say basses and celli have more of wide mic setup while violins have more of the close mics? again thank you a lot for these videos they really helped me a lot
I use mic positions to get the sound i want rather than positioning it in the room so probably the mic positions for each instrument in a string section would be quite similar. Then I would pan the instruments if they really needed it but most are now sampled in situ
Beautiful cue, btw - just listened to the whole cue through those first three tracks. Fascinated by the harmonic confidence towards the end, that goes off far away from my slightly traditional Protestant, Northern European harmonic palette! Do you do courses in how to write that kind of harmony? Am getting bored with my "Carols for Choirs" instincts! :-)
