AUS230 Learning Journal - W5

Monday Session

During this Monday I booked the S6 to tweak A Quiet Place II trailer but ended up having to use the time to edit since I was busy over the weekend with family. I got most of the dialogue cut and placed where I wanted this session and I began to arrange the sessions into three different ProTool files. One for the Dialogue only, one

Monday Night Session

I was able to get record Lost Goat Found again and this time we tracked their guitars

Monday night from 5:30 - 9:30 recorded Lost Goat Found Guitars for "Education"

I pitched to them that I can manage a production video if they wanted and they were keen

Wednesday Session

Even though I researched about LuFS earlier in the last two weeks I was still unsure as to how this applied to my mixing session. I then watched a few videos like the one below and it totally cleared up my understanding.

Depending on what platform your music/audio mix will be delivered on, it will have to be mixed and mastered to the relevant loudness levels of that platform. Having a mix that is too loud will result in the platform service to either normalize your track or compress your mix and possibly introduce distortion.

During this session we all showcased our WIP mix for a Quiet Place II and I received the following feedback;

"The mix was not complete and would not be suitable for showcasing to a client."

I listened to the mixes shown by my peers and found that it was interesting that everyone had an extremely different take to approaching the sound replacement project.

Friday Session

We were lucky enough to have Alex Mills perform one of his originals for us to record him during this lesson.

Recording Alex Mills in Live Room A, next to the S6

During the session Guy worked with us and setup a Shure SM7B and one of the two matched pair of Royer 121 ribbon mics for capturing his vocals, interesting to note that during this session a secondary pop filter was placed in front of the first one effectively double filtering any possible plosives.

We tried to setup a mid/side with the Royer 121 and Neumann KM184 but due to the pre-amps failing on us we were not able to get it working in the end. It would have been nice to record with the two excellent mics for M/S. For recording the guitar we used a pencil mic the other KM184 focused onto the middle of the guitar neck near the sound hole to capture the clear strumming. On the side to we used a C414 to get warm "boomy" sound from the guitar body. The resultant sound was a clear strumming from the cardioid mic and the large bass sound from the guitar body.

Alex was a true professional in the studio and supplied us with what he called a "rough mix" which almost sounded like it was already mixed to work with during recording. This helped us quickly understand his vision for the track after listening to it before he arrived.

During the session we tracked Alex's guitar sections first then after a good session we tracked his vocals for the remainder of the day. Guy made the call to close finish early as he could hear and feel that Alex was starting to strain his voice after singing for almost an 2 hours. We all listened back to what we recorded and parted ways after thanking Alex for his time.

Week 5 Summary

This week was definitely action packed again and left me little time to relax. After recording the boys from Lost Goat Found on Monday night I was left with little time to work on my other academic work. The recording was a success and I was able to put into practice my studio session management skills. Since I had to record them over the coming weeks, at the same time I had to work on the trailer for A Quiet Place II. It did not help that I lived about one and half hour drive away from Uni and was working Saturday graveyard shifts.

On the Wednesday I finally understood what LuFS were and how it is used as a common standard to measure loudness in your music/dialogue. Long story short there were many standards developed by every country regarding what was acceptable loudness in broadcast levels. That is why currently most online streaming platforms will specify a loudness limit. For example if I was to submit a track to Spotify, I will have to have a mixed and mastered track that was -14 LuFS. They want all songs in their platform to have some sort of loudness consistency so that their listeners do not have to change their volume settings all the time and annoy their customers. Thus reducing the chance of losing market share.

After looking receiving the feedback for my WIP mix for a quiet place I decided that this week I will have to give up my Saturday shift for this week if I am to be able to submit on time for the AQPII trailer. I worked on the trailer for the rest of the weekend and was able to compose a simple Baroque styled section using just a treble recorder and guitar to convey movement in the scene by Sunday night.

During the Friday session it was intriguing and very informative studio tracking session. One of the benefits of studying at SAE was watching Guy work with a professional artist like Alex. Guy obviously had previously built up good rapport with Alex before the session and this gave the whole session a happy and interesting vibe. The biggest take away from this session for me was how Guy setup two pop filters in-front of the Royer 121 and the Shure SM7B. The reasoning was clear afterwards. Guy did not want to run any risk of getting any plosives in the tracking stage. Also since the closest pop filter was on a separate stand, even if Alex accidentally bumped it, it wont affect the second on that was attached to the mic. There is nothing worse that getting a perfect take and finding out later there was a bump or a verse that was too breathy. This trick will stay in my toolbox of knowledge for good :D

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