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Top 10 Reasons For Bad Sound (And What You Can Do About It…)
Aug. 03, 2010, by Karl Winkler
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  Digital, Sound, Eq, Acoustics, Training

What can you do to improve your “Mad Mixing Skilz”?

First, lose the ego and realize that you’ve got a lot to learn. Everyone mixes differently, but there are some common threads between great mixers. They know what kind of a sound they want, and they technically know how to get it.

They are self-critical and objective about what they are hearing. They know that hard and fast rules used to mic drums or to EQ guitars don’t often work in the real world. The way they really EQ is to understand how all the instruments and voices fit together, and they come up with a way to make that work by giving each sound its own space in the mix.

Great mix engineers remain open-minded and stay in the present moment so that they can actively listen to what’s happening in front of them. And then they take action.

They also know what the artist wants and what the audience expects.

All these things are skills that can be learned. What are you waiting for?


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Comments (2) Most recent displayed first
Posted by Karl Winkler  on  08/06/10  at  03:44 PM
Graham, thank you for your note. Although I mention Haas at the end, Time of Arrival is the heading for #6 and I think it applies here. And, to some extent, the binaural function is at stake here - if you hear sound first from the left PA stack, it will appear to you that the left PA stack is the original source. And with that, there is some cognitive dissonance: person taking is in front of me, but the sound is coming from the left PA stack.

Sure, the goal is to have everything arrive at the same time, but that relationship only exists for a narrow strip of the audience. I've found that by thinking about the greatest portion of the audience as receiving "synched" sound, that it also means that some people receive the original sound first, many get it at the same time as the PA sound, and then some still receive the PA sound first. Mainly, I was attempting (perhaps badly) to raise the issue that I've found most PA operators are completely unaware of.

Posted by Graham Gallimore  on  08/03/10  at  05:52 PM
Great article but point 6 is totally wrong!

If you 'delay the signal just enough so that most people in the audience hear the person’s voice slightly before they hear the sound from the PA' all you're doing is reducing the coherence and creating comb filtering.

The goal should be for both sounds to arrive at the same time.

The Haas effect only applies in the horizontal plane as it is a binaural function.

I am happy to clarify this further if required.

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