I have a week off, but as a freelancer that really means I get to work on my own projects but don’t get to invoice anyone… So its going to be a busy week off as I have lots to do, but one thing I have noticed with the virtual interns which may apply here as well, is that it is often faster for me to answer their specific questions than it is for me to dream up, develop, write & edit a decent rant on some worthy topic… I also noticed this when i did a talk on sound design at Dunedin University – the most fun part for me was the Q&A, as it meant we discussed topics the audience were specifically interested in & it became less of a monologue… So while I am busy this week if there is anything you want to ask me, then please consider this an open thread specifically for that purpose.
Its so peaceful in here!
I’ve been working really hard at getting vocals – dialogue – to sit well with music. And it tends to become problematic when drums are involved…any help would be much appreciated.
some things to try:
- keeping dialogue clarity in complex loud moments can often involve compressing the dynamics of the dialogue, either using a compressor or manually riding a fader on the quiet bits of dialogue or volume graphing. During a film mix we definitely stop & manually turn up even small parts of words eg if the p of the word ‘stop’ is getting lost (or mayeb the actor didnt speak it clearly) so it sounds like ‘sto…’ then first we try volume graphing the ‘p’ up in level – if that doesnt work a dialogue editor will also look at other takes or other times the same actor uses that letter, and will replace just that part of the word – so the performance doesnt change radically but clarity is retained…
- I suspect you are really asking about mixing music rather than film, and one bit of advice here is multi-tracking vocals. if you listen to a lot of pop songs you notice that the vocal isn’t a single take but multiple takes layered & tightly synced. This isn’t a new technique by any means but if the singer is skilled or you don’t mind doing some editing/tuning it can have a significant effect.
i think it was Brian Eno who said it, I cant find the reference, but he analysed all the top songs over a number of years & something like 90% of them featured backing vocals. Which leads me to another suggestion
- building the vocal to fill LR can appear to give it more power, so maybe for the chorus you have multitracked vocals & you can pan some hard left, some hard right & the primary vocal centre. Same also goes with effects, try using delay & reverb to spread the vocal across LR
these are just suggestions though – i’d suspect there are people reading this with far more experience at mixing vocals/dialogue than I, so hopefully they will comment too…
Thanks for the reply Tim! I was asking about film primarily, not music. A lot of the work I do is score for short film/TV shows that involves dialogue and when they want a piece with drums in it, it is sometimes difficult to create something that is effective without clashing with the dialogue. But thanks for the music tip too – I’m working on a track right now that depends heavily on the vocal and this will help! Thank you!
In film 90% of the time dialogue is coming from the centre speaker, so avoiding or minimising it can be helpful too… We usually always have music delivered to film mixes in stems and one essential split stem is always drums & percussion, as it can sometimes clash with or be swamped by FX too… Predicting how things will play in context is one of the biggest challenges when creating the elements of a soundtrack…
If you have any comments about how as a freelancer you juggle your personal projects around your paid work, I’d be interested. E.g., if you have, say, a three hour window for your own stuff, do you chip away at a bigger project, or try to do a few smaller jobs? Do you have any explicit strategy for making sure some progress gets made on the personal projects that are important to you? Do you work to any sort of schedule/timetable, or squeeze things in where you can (I imagine you could have to be quite reactive to clients’ demands/deadlines)?
Or do you just wait until you have a (planned? unplanned?) week free, then go like the clappers?
I guess the secret is to enjoy both the paid and unpaid work, so one doesn’t resent the “day job” for leaving little time for one’s “art”…
hmmmm yes, the eternal battle…
I work on my own stuff most evenings, so i am constantly chipping away at projects, whether its actually working on them or working on the how/what/when etc…
In the last year the biggest impact on making progress with my projects has been a combination of two bits of technology: dropbox and voodoopad
http://www.dropbox.com/
http://www.voodoopad.com/voodoopad/
The problem that these two provide the solution to is this: I currently have seven active projects of my own and another five or so planned… But I felt like I was never making progress with any of them, as there was no way I could get an overview of them all or randomnly contribute to any one of them… Eg when I am working on project 1 i might have an idea for project 5 & as I am actually focused on project 1 it may be a fleeting idea – if I don’t document it now it may be lost.
So I have a single Voodoo Pad document with a page for every project, and I put everything about each project in there – info, ideas, links, images etc…
At one point I pasted a series of headings into each page & each project page now scrolls offscreen by about ten pages deep..
CRUX: one sentence that states the aim & outcome of the project
CONTENT:
REFERENCES:
PROCESS:
DELIVERY:
PROMOTION:
TO DO next:
TO DO later:
The only other thing I can really say is DEADLINES are really important.
I notice with film work that a lot of the most important decisions & work are done relatively close to the deadline eg if I’ve worked on a film for six months, the mix decisions made on the last day are THE MOST IMPORTANT work we do.
At that point it is all about the final finished film & the clarity of decision making & priorities is totally dependent on that being the last day to make changes.
So if your personal project has no deadline how will you ever arrive at that time when you will do your most important work?
So this week I prioritised finishing a music project – which is launching a net.label
http://dub45.com
The first release (two dub mixes) are booked for mastering this Saturday, so my week off is carefully planned so I know I have got the two tracks as well written & produced as possible. I MUST take them from my writing studio at home to my work studio on Thursday night so I can mix them, and Friday is my buffer zone – to reassess the mixes, do final edits & output stems for mastering.
It HAS to happen or these two tracks will remain with the dozens of other tunes on my hard drive that will never be finished. Its been over ten years since I released any music & I’ve been planning & building my netlabel for over a year now, but it all means nothing without the DEADLINE!
WE LOVE DEADLINES!
Thanks, that’s really helpful. I agree that it’s important to have a way of making use of small amounts of time and mental energy. Do you think there’s value in putting the “work in progress” pages out on one’s blog or site where they’re publicly visible, or is it better to only report completed work? I suspect the latter…
I hadn’t considered deadlines to be that important, but I can see how they would be very effective. I guess the trick is to set up the deadlines properly, e.g. by booking the mastering studio, rather than just saying “I must get this finished by Thursday or I’ll give myself a good telling-off,” or something.
Particularly for electronic music-making (and especially for modular synthesis, perhaps), where the musician could keep working on a piece indefinitely in the absence of a deadline.
Excellent! Lots to think about. I hope you’ve finished your tracks to your satisfaction, and I look forward to checking out the launch of your net.label.
Cheers!
Hi Tim, thanks for the opportunity. My question is a little basic, but I’m curious as to how you organize reverb and acoustic environments in large projects. I did a large radio play a while back with lots of different acoustic spaces. Automating all the sends and panning for each reverb became very unwieldy. Especially for the main characters and for SFX tracks that spanned the whole production. The engineers where I intern take a very different approach, and almost never use reverb. They either choose SFX recordings that already have ambiance, print reverb straight to the track, or don’t worry about it at all. What is your aproach? Also, at what stage (recording, pre-mix, final mix) do you start mixing in ambiance?
Thanks again.
I print reverbs if they are critical to the design of the sound, but not usually for ‘normal’ acoustics – those are handled by the mixers.
So some examples of when I have provided printed reverbs (usually IRs via Altiverb or TL Space) to the mix would be
- specific strange acoustics
eg in Black Sheep, the heros are in a cave & they hear sheep jump down into the cave, but from a distance. This is a combination of verbs and I printed versions so that when I had a run through with the director we could talk about how it should play, whether the verbs worked on the dopplered sheep baaa & landing etc…
- transitions into or out of point of view, dream sequences, altered reality etc..
So these are all specific moments in a film & are intrinsic to designing that scene for sound… In comparison eg foley – its recorded dry in a studio and whether its interior or exterior it needs some verb/slap to match into production audio. So the mixers tend to have reverbs for this purpose available in the final mix. And their lovely Lexicons & TC electronics hardware verbs are better (& more expensive) than my plugins. Plus that is an important part of their job – to mix & shape perspective.
Their reverb hardware chases timecode so they can change algorithms on a scene by scene basis, and when a film is recut the reverb automation must eb conformed in the same way that the desk automation must be too..
I’m not sure exactly how many reverb devices the mixers have, but each one must be discrete for stem mixing eg you can’t go printing dialogue reverb into the FX stem or the M&E will get rejected!
So if one mixer is mixing Music and Dialogue, thats at least 2 reverbs..
And if the other is doing FX, Ambiences & Foley then thats another 2 or 3 reverbs..
They will need an overall reverb for the scene but also potentially need another verb for specific use for eg matching ADR to production sound, or for making source music feel part of its environment, or for pushing FX & Foley through a transition etc…
But note we don’t mix films in ProTools – they are mixed at Park road Post on a Series 5 Euphonix fully automated desk with 370 inputs etc…
Maybe some people who mix TV in ProTools might have some helpful advice? I have heard stories of people using two instances of Altiverb, so they can alternate switching presets between scenes without having to recall them on the first frame of the scene change, so eg scene 1 = Altiverb 1, scene 2 = Altiverb 2, scene 3 – Altiverb 1 etc etc…
Sorry I’m a little late to the party
I’ve been buried. Tim I would like to know how you deal with killing off ideas that you are in love with and the director or producers aren’t? Thanks.
hmmm… this is going to sound slightly trite but it isn’t something I’ve really had happen much at all. I guess partly because I don’t invest huge amounts of time into something without getting feedback from the director, as that is really the basis of collaboration – having ideas but being open to the direction of their evolution.
I know people who get very angry & bitter if their brilliant ideas aren’t used in a film but you have to always remember it isn’t your project, its theirs. And while you may have been working on it for months, they’ve been working on it for years and may have very particular ideas as to why they see & hear it a certain way…
One relevant concept is that of mixes & screenings, revisions & fixes etc… On a film last year there was a moment where someone onscreen is standing in their garden thinking about really heavy emotional memories. When I was editing that scene I arrived at the idea of there being no ‘sync sound’ for that moment ie no natural backyard ambience, so it was like he was oblivious to the real world at that moment & was still living in the memory (the previous scene was a montage sequence of those memories) The way I cut it worked so strongly (& the director liked it) that I presumed thats how it would play in the final mix, but during the mix the director asked if we could go back to ‘reality’ much sooner at that moment. I explained why I hadn’t done it that way & the director totally agreed that worked, but was still keen to try it the other way. So I didn’t say another word, we changed it but after we had a double head screening & were discussing the fixes to be done, I raised the issue again – was it more dramatic or emotionally effective? As an audience where were we at that point? In the backyard or in his head, thinking about the memories? We discussed it more & reverted back to the original approach, and it was instantly apparent as to why it worked better.
Why I repeat all this is because an important consideration when working on films is that some directors do not like fait accomplis. While you may have tried it ten ways that were wrong, to find the 11th right way, the director probably hasn’t been on that journey with you & may still be thinking version 7 was the one. So sometimes directors need to hear it ‘wrong’ to know that something else is right, or at least better. And you have to be patient & open to this concept because in hindsight they may well be right for reasons that you weren’t aware of…
I will fight for an approach or a sound (or as above, the absence of a sound) if I really believe in it, but good advice for every aspect of film making as a collaborative art is: PICK YOUR BATTLES! If a situation ever becomes confrontational then its very likely that there were fundamental flaws in the collaborative process that lead to that confrontation. And as you can’t change other people, you have to look at your own behaviour & work out how better to approach it.
Of course my library is full of sounds recorded for films that weren’t used, but thats intentional. If I need a specific sound effect for a film, I don’t go recording one ‘perfect’ version of it, I go record every imaginable variation of it that I can find, partly because I want options when editing in context of the film but also because there is a good chance this wont be the only project that ever needs that sound.