In-Your-Face Strings
Getting a Hollywood-close Sound
Spitfire's Audio's tuba has so much bass that it can hog the entire mix. It doesn't sound realistic, but it sounds even worse if I want to use a pipe organ pedal part or sub-synth to enrich the low end. Using a high-pass filter on the tuba until it—when heard with the rest of the brass—sounds like a good recording of a brass section, fixes this problem and frees up the sub range for better bass control and body. To cover one basic principle: computers limit the space we have for volume, like a small stage or a cup that can only hold so much water. 1's and 0's aren't like the physics of a stage that can be expanded (to hold more instruments). With math, there's a fixed volume limit.
Being in the room with a cellist is better than listening to a recording. For more clarity, we want to keep the best part of the sound untampered, and simply remove unwanted elements. Audio FX (dsp) alters and distorts sound. For clarity and definition, less is more. Besides, the most powerful, natural, and amazing EQ ever invented is the facility music gets recorded in. The EQ is the room. A room's reflections—not reverb plugins, but the real deal—shape and recolor a sound continually. Real-world physics is infinitely more rich with detail than any single algorithm will ever be. We want the room, but we also want to control it.
Film Research
Several of the top composers and mastering engineers from the film industry have stressed envelope, mic alignment, and other experiments as alternatives to compression. For a clean, bold, and ultra-pristine orchestral sound, there's a few gold nuggets here.
Percieved Closeness
- Solo Focus
- Mix a solo violin with a section. It helps us hear the performing action, the bow, the perceived detail we easily hear in a real life performance.
- Tighter Attack, Part 1
- Drop the volume after the start of the note. Dry recordings are lifeless. We want the color of a large room, but without excessive tail that washes out fast tempos and complex percussion. Natural or not, most ears like the result more. This is simply using a computer to enhance acoustics beyond what's possible with walls and architecture.
- Tighter Attack, Part 2
- With sampled instruments, edit the envelope of all your staccatos or any articulation you want to crisp up. This granular tightening can excite strings in a way like nothing else can.
- Aligning Mics
- Close mics hear notes first. Shifting tree and room mics so the note starts at the same time as close mics (as if sound traveled instantly) creates a bigger-than-life sound. You can do this to stems or in Kontakt if you change the instrument mode to "sampler" (loading everything into the RAM).
- The Hass Effect
- Add Haas delay (see Pan Savvy) to an instrument. This is technically a matter of width, but haas is a pseudo-width. The subtlety of the timing change makes the instrument feel closer than it really is, or like it's surrounding us.
- Balance
- Our ears like a certain balance. That balance changes at different listening volumes (Fletcher Munson). Gulfoss is an AI equalizer that knows what most ears want and uses that data to improve clarity.
Good mixing is about an awareness of competing frequencies, ideas, and ultimately an awareness of what our ear will enjoy noticing most in any given moment. With samples, a brass section doesn't know to let the strings take over. Real human beings know who's got the best part and how loud each part should be. A good mix, is in fact, a performance. Mixing and composing are part of the same art: directing attention.
"I don't compress my orchestra."
"We don't want the reverb to overcome the direct sound... or dialog"