Who are you currently touring with? 

My main gig over the last few years has been mixing FOH for Vintage Trouble out of Los Angeles. We’ve toured all over the world, and most of my other work fell by the wayside once we teamed up! I also double-dipped as their Tour Manager for a while which was a great learning experience.

Who are some other acts/bands that you have worked with? 

The Jacksons are another group that I do FOH for when they play the States, as well as Evan Ross and his wife Ashlee Simpson. I also spent a few years as the house monitor guy at the Knitting Factory back in my hometown so I’ve had the opportunity to work with a bunch of bands, including The Neighbourhood (also from Los Angeles) who took me out on my first tour back in 2014.

How long have you been doing live sound and what was your path to a career in audio engineering? 

Coming up on 15 years now! Like a lot of engineers, I played in a band, tried to figure out how to record an album, and everything snowballed from there. I also attended a lot of bad sounding concerts and wanted to understand why they didn’t sound better.

What is your favourite console and why? 

Yamaha CL5. Not the flashiest choice, but in my opinion all of the current pro digital consoles sound good enough to mix a great show on. I’m typically mixing on the house desk with far less prep time than I’d like, so fast workflow is much more valuable to me than a slightly more pleasant tonal quality. Honorable mention to Avid’s Profile for similar ease of use, and Digico’s SD range for best overall sound! Have also heard great things about Yamaha’s new PM10 and Midas’ Heritage-D but haven’t gotten to try them yet.

Favourite microphone or any other piece of kit? 

For studio work, the most exciting mic that comes to mind is the Slate VMS… The flexibility of being able to switch between that many great sounding mics and preamps without committing is a game changer for me in the studio. It’s like having the flexibility of a guitar amp simulator, without all the tone-related downsides. As far as other pieces… for live work, the AmpClamps and the Kelly Shu kick mounts make life easy for me, for the drummer/guitarist, and for the house crew.

Most memorable gig or career highlight? 

Montreux Jazz Festival was incredible. There was so much technological innovation and attention to detail, not only on the audio end but in the whole experience for everyone involved. Hellfest was a dream come true for me as well; I got to see so many of my favourite bands, and I’ll never forget the site of 100,000 French metalheads enthusiastically singing along to a Vintage Trouble ballad when we played between Municipal Waste and Gojira! Finally, I did a show with Ashlee Simpson and Evan Ross at The Roxy in LA with Evan’s mom Diana sitting in the front row smiling. Definitely one of the most surreal and heartwarming gigs I’ve been a part of.

What are three mixing techniques you regularly employ? 

I love using delay whenever appropriate, and most modern consoles make it easy to tap in the proper subdivision for the repeats so I’m always tapping out the tempo and riding the sends/returns/feedback level, almost like a nervous tic.

Sidechain compression is a newer technique that I enjoy using whenever I’m on the right console for it; it really helps the vocals and low end sit right when you’ve exhausted all other options.

Playlists for each song can be really useful when you get to mix the same band on the same console for a good amount of time. It’s easy to overdo and lose perspective, so I will usually only have the playlist to affect the release time on the master compressor, so that it grooves with the song tempo, and to cue up the specific FX for that song. By making those two things automatic and precise, it frees up precious mental energy that can be applied to fixing other potential issues throughout the show.

What are three pieces of gear or features that have come out and been game changers for you? 

Hate to say it, but the release of the X32 was a big one for me. It was the first digital console that I really got to know, and it opened a lot of doors for me. I liked being able to throw it in my car and take it to local gigs, and also use it as an in-ear (and occasionally FOH) console for the band that I play in.

Around that time I started using tablet control regularly on consoles that support it, which was a huge game changer for tuning speakers. Being able to tweak parameters while standing in an ideal listening position is amazing!

Lastly, the RF Venue spectrum analyser looks to be a massive game changer, although I haven’t actually picked one up yet! Unless you use one, or are at a big festival with a wireless coordinator (who is probably using one), choosing the frequencies for your wireless gear feels like you’re shooting blindly. I hope to have one next time I do a monitor gig where the band is on ears.

How have your working methods changed since you began live sound mixing? 

I’ve had enough time to develop a solid workflow, thankfully, so that most of the typical audio problems I used to have to deal with are solved before they materialise. More energy can be put into making sure that the show runs on time, that the bartenders can hear their drink orders, and that the other crew members and venue staff are having a good day. They’re all things that can get overlooked when you’re staring down at the console the whole time.

Any tips/words of wisdom for someone starting out? 

Keep an open mind and understand that you don’t know everything. There are valuable audio-related lessons to be learned every day, whether you’re stage-handing for a corporate gig or watching a local show in a tiny bar.

For those looking to tour, I would recommend taking a good look at yourself and making sure that you’re a person who people will want to be around day-in and day-out. Find out what your worst traits are and work on them. Find a band whose music you can get into, whose members you can stand to be around, and really become a part of the team.

Finally, to those engineers who are already touring – don’t double-dip as Tour Manager! It’s a great learning experience and everyone should do it briefly, but your mixes will suffer (as will the audience experience), the artist won’t be properly taken care of, and you’ll get burned out. There are many talented TM/FOH people out there and I respect what they do, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it!

GAMES

Games are interactive, making them quite different to other forms of media. Interactive formats are constructed to behave much like the real world does, so there can never be a single ‘final’ mix for a game; the mix is created automatically by the game’s ‘sound engine’, in real time, in response to the player’s actions. That means you can’t just drop in a convenient stereo ambience of a forest, for example. The player is likely to be walking through that forest and can choose their own path, and that will determine the sounds that are heard and how they are mixed together. In the forest example, we need to have individual bird sounds placed in the trees that the player moves between. The stereo or surround impression the player hears is from multiple mono sounds positioned in a 3D world. So when the player walks between two trees the bird sounds will be heard on either side, and these sounds will grow louder as the player approaches them and softer as the player moves away from them. All of that real-time manipulation is done by the game’s sound engine. The audio team can establish guidelines for how loud each individual sound or group of sounds is, how they blend together and so on, but it is the actions of the player and their specific position at any one time that defines the mix they will hear. This makes balancing game audio hugely challenging because you cannot blend individual sound elements to cover gaps or weak transitions. Most of the individual sound elements are exposed to the player, and the player’s journey through the game world determines how they are blended together.

Obviously, all sounds used within a game need to be clean and very isolated. Going back to my forest example, I’ll need separate bird sounds, a separate wind sound, a separate stream sound, and separate versions of any other sound elements; they all need to be highly isolated, and placed individually. When I prepare bird sounds to use in a game, for example, I need to cut them up into individual calls and place them into the desired place within the game’s 3D world. A common tool for this purpose is Wwise, produced by Canadian company Audiokinetic. Wwise allows me to take a selection of individual bird sounds and define their behaviour so that I can create a volumetric area in which birds will twitter randomly in real time. I essentially simulate real-world bird behaviour inside the game world.

VIRTUAL & AUGMENTED REALITY

The New Reality formats are hugely different to every other platform; even games, which they share some similarities with. The key reason for this is the desire to create a realistic spherical sound field for the audience. Remember, we are placing our audience inside the virtual world; unlike a game, they are no longer just looking into that world through a screen, they are immersed within it.

The various technologies we use to achieve this attempt to simulate how we localise sound in the real world. They simulate the interaural amplitude differences, the interaural time and phase differences, and the filtering of sounds reaching us from different directions, all to create a realistic immersive sound experience. The technology is still evolving, but that’s what it aims to do. There are many companies trying to create the perfect technology solution for this functionality. Companies such as Two Big Ears were doing an excellent job of this, and that is why they were bought by Facebook – their technology now forms the basis of the Oculus’ audio system. At this point in time we do not fully understand the science of how humans triangulate sound sources, so it is no wonder that the different technology solutions vary in effectiveness.

The important thing about all of the above is that the amplitude and frequency makeup of a sound are critical aspects of how our brains calculate where a sound is coming from. This means we cannot just boost the midrange to give a sound more presence or add a sub channel for added impact, because any enhancement like this could interfere with the directional nature of spatial positioning. Essentially, if we want a sound to be located 45 degrees to the audience’s right and 15 degrees above the horizon, any alterations we make to that sound may influence the perception of where it originates from. Elements that might add excitement to a project, such as enhanced low frequency content, need to be carefully designed to highlight the audio without working against the illusion of realism.

As with game audio, I start with clean and well-isolated mono files and place them into the simulated ‘world’, allowing the technology to handle distance attenuation and occlusion filtering. Then I layer in combinations of stereo, 3D, ambisonic and even binaural sound material to achieve the end result. For example, VR Regatta, the VR sailing game for Oculus Rift, uses an array of over a dozen layers that play simultaneously in real time – just to create the spherical wind sounds! The layers are all interacting in real time within the spherical sound field; in many ways, it is more like a live performance than a pre-produced product.

Much of what makes this content sound great is achieved during implementation. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are both going to be incredible formats in the future, and I honestly think no one has gotten close to realising their potential yet. Audio production for these formats is difficult and challenging, but it is also incredibly satisfying as we are literally creating a whole new form of media and discovering what can be effective. Good quality isolated audio is critical to the immersive effectiveness of these formats. If you plan on working in the VR, AR or 360 video space, I highly recommend you check out some of the discussion groups on Facebook that talk about the processes. The technology is changing so quickly that it can be a huge benefit to keep in touch with others working in this field, and seek their advice when necessary. We are all fairly new to these formats, and sharing the knowledge helps everyone.

TRAILERS

The approach to creating great audio for movie trailers is very different to games, VR, AR, and, surprisingly, film. It is odd and a little counter-intuitive to discover that the trailer for a film will have a very different sound production process than the film it is promoting. For a start, it’s a completely different team that works on the trailers. Movie trailers, especially in Hollywood, are big business – there are studios dedicated entirely to producing high-impact trailers! And that is the core of it: it’s a specialised process because film trailers have 30 to 60 seconds to grab the audience’s attention and get them excited and engaged. While the visuals and dialogue for a trailer are cuts from the film, the sound and music are created specifically for the trailer.

Sound Effects (SFX) for trailers are super hyped. If the dial goes up to 10, then trailer SFX sit somewhere around 12 or 13! There is certainly an element of the loudness wars here, but it is more nuanced than just turning up the volume and compressing the hell out of everything. The sounds themselves need to simultaneously achieve two things: they must be punchy and really cut through, but they also need to stay well out of the way of the trailer’s voiceover and music. It takes many, many layers of sounds to achieve the end result, and the editors do an incredible job of blending all this together for the audience. As someone who has been recording and using my own raw material for 20 years, I know my content really well. Despite this, there are a handful of my sounds in the trailer for the latest Fast & Furious movie (‘Hobbs & Shaw’) that I cannot even recognise because of how densely the sound has been layered and mixed to get that high impact end result.

When creating trailer SFX there is a significant emphasis on mid-range content, which is often boosted to what would normally be considered silly levels. The trailer music usually occupies much of the frequency range we want to use; it dominates the very low and very high end of the spectrum, forcing us to tailor the SFX to have maximum impact inside of those two extremes. When preparing the sounds, I have a template where I layer my own sounds and do a lot of work to boost that mid-range frequency content. I find this tricky because the easiest way to make a sound cut through a mix is to add or boost high-frequency content so the crispness of the sound carries it through. Without being able to rely on the lovely high frequencies, I need to paint with a broad brush across the middle of the frequency spectrum. Compression is essential, but I do a lot of that work manually. If I am layering eight to 10 sound files I will build a custom volume curve for each sound, and tune each one so that I hear the exact elements I want to hear at the exact time I want to hear them.

I mentioned earlier that game sound consists of many different layers that are all automatically mixed together by the game engine to provide a real-time experience. Film trailers are the polar opposite: the layers are not just hammered together, they are surgically grafted with each other to allow each element to do its best work and then move out of the way for the next element. The challenges are very different for trailers, but the intensity of the audio content you are working with really creates excitement. Working on trailers is fun but very challenging, and, of course, it’s always cool to hear your content on the big screen! Just be careful of your ears because that high intensity can be really fatiguing.

FILM

I am not going to include television as I have not worked for TV beyond commercials, and my film experience is not as significant as my game experience. Nonetheless, there are some fundamental differences between working with sound for linear media such as film, and for non-linear media such as games, and these differences influence my approach to each platform.

The main thing for me with film is to achieve and maintain sonic consistency over time. One of the key aspects of film production I have encountered is the room tone/atmos and ambience setup. It’s a little like the audio equivalent of colour grading, where you have to take all of these individual shots, from different angles and with different lighting, and try to create a consistent lighting look across all the edits. It’s the same with the room tones and atmos. You need to remove all the background content from the dialogue tracks, as it is often really different and distracting to the audience, and replace it with a nice consistent tone across each scene. It’s like applying a smooth undercoat before you start painting.

With film, I tend to build up sounds from the rear to the front. I start with long, smooth, clean edits and transitions, and use spot sound effects to provide support for actions and events. Again, all the content I am editing and preparing needs to be super clean because, unlike non-linear media that is mixed in real time, film has no limits to the number of sounds you can combine simultaneously. Layers and layers can be combined, but every single layer has the potential to contribute to the overall level of unwanted noise. Combining many layers risks becoming an utter mess of unwanted noise if the sounds are not super clean to begin with.

Unlike non-linear media, you have much more control in film because you can set a scene exactly how you want it to sound and it will play back the same every time. After years of working in games, this is very different; you can push things to their limits and know they will never exceed those limits. This is why films can be dynamically more intense than games. The interactive and immersive nature of games is where they get their impact, not from a super tight mix.

SEEN & UNSEEN

The process of laying out tracks and building up sonic worlds allows for lots of creativity, but the underlying consideration is communicating with the audience about things seen and unseen. Audio is our principal emotional sense, and the soundtrack for any media needs to enhance and support the narrative of the dialogue and music while also transporting the audience into the worlds we create.

Each delivery format has its own challenges, strengths and weaknesses. Understanding the best way to approach each format allows us to enjoy the process of creating an audio world, rather than fighting with the content to make it fit. Never be afraid to try new things or crazy ideas. So much of the best creative work comes from folk who think and act outside the box.

We all work in sound because we could not imagine ourselves doing anything else! As someone who records raw material for sound libraries and also uses that material in sound production, I’m experienced with the entire workflow – from capture of raw sounds to delivery of finished product. This provides me with a useful perspective, and I honestly think it makes me better at both jobs. When recording raw sounds on location, I consider all the ways I might want to manipulate those sounds as part of production. I will often record sounds that are very ordinary in their raw format, but I know are going to be a great basis for sound design. Likewise, when doing sound design I am aware of the limitations of recording on location and just how hard it can be to capture really clean content. I am going to explore these concepts in more detail in future issues of AudioTechnology. Stay tuned!

VOCAL DELIVERY

The show uses Shure ULX-D wireless, piping audio into the mixing console via AES digital. Dale uses a Rennaissance Compressor plug-in from a Waves pack rather than the desk’s onboard compressor: “I’m using the R Compressor to get some extra level on the lower-level parts but it’s not harsh sounding to my ear when she really does lean into it.”

From there, the vocal goes into a Waves F6 dynamic EQ. “The F6 EQ is especially handy for getting the vocal sound I’m after in smaller venues, with smaller PAs. For a larger gig such as this, the F6 is just doing some low mid attenuation. When she’s speaking it leaves more of the low mid in there, yet when she really puts some level into it, it pulls the low mids back a little.”

The vocal then hits the Waves C6 which is doing some de-essing: “I’m just using the two floating bands to grab whatever is jumping out in certain songs — nothing too crazy.”

Vocal clarity is key for Dale. He keeps Sampa’s channel locked in on the last fader of the console — he always knows where to find it and works that fader plenty.

“It’s mainly a balance thing. I’m not so much into savage EQ — I try to let the vocal breathe and sound as natural as possible. In fact, I like to use less channel EQ and more system EQ. I like to get the PA sounding right then everything should sit in the mix with a HPF and maybe a little notch of 1dB here or there.

“I like to use reverb as a space tool more than an effect,” continues Dale. “So I’ll try to place my backing vocals, for example, in a nice little package behind the main vocal.

“I adhere to the old school method of determining how loud I want the vocal to be and work backwards from there — build my mix underneath that. That’s about a balance.

“I like to mix the show and not rely on automation. I know the moments when I need to really push the guitar or bass. It’s a dynamic mix. I’m not ‘snapshotting’ every single song, locking myself into a box. I know how I want each song to sound and I use the faders to get there.”

GO FORTH & MULTIPLY

Hardware or software gear can also be cascaded in series, such that each device adds a little to the overall effect. I’ve heard this technique called ‘sonic varnishing’ — adding layer upon layer of more subtle effects to hopefully achieve audio nirvana. This can, for instance, work well with compression, by letting each device in the chain tame a part of the sound; or with reverb, where you can end up with more complex and individual acoustic environments by combining different aspects from each. Additionally, the software plug-in can be used in a way that’s less feasible with hardware, and that’s to keep adding multiple instances to each and every one of your playback channels. For most of us this would be prohibitively expensive to do with hardware, but it’s the perfect opportunity to let software plug-ins shine.

The most obvious examples are the proliferation of ‘console’ plug-ins that add some ‘flavour’ to your mixes. These will typically roll off the frequency response at low and high extremes, add a dash of benign harmonic distortion for added richness (particularly at the low end), and while the difference may be extremely subtle on a single channel, once added to every channel, the sonic difference is more pronounced. There are lots of such plug-ins on offer, many of which recreate the entire control set of famous console designs, complete with sections for EQ, compression and so on, while some also offer other analogue subtleties: such as small random variations in frequency response from one instance of a console channel EQ to another, to mimic the inevitable spread of electronic component values that you get in real-world circuitry. This randomness can ‘flesh out’ electronic sounds in particular, and such variations between the left and right channels of a stereo EQ will convert a straight down the middle mono centre signal into a more fleshed-out central mono mass.

Nevertheless, you don’t necessarily need all this functionality to explore the essential analogue console ‘sound’. If you want to dip your toe in the console waters without spending any money, why not download Airwindows’ Channel7 (www.airwindows.com/channel7), which offers a choice of three basic console types along with a drive control that morphs from perfectly clean, through very pure saturation, to more obvious fatness. I’ve mentioned Chris Johnson of Airwindows before in this column, because his plug-ins often achieve subtle yet beneficial results due to novel algorithms of his own design. He deliberately avoids the slavish modelling of real-world audio artefacts in favour of novel combinations of his own mathematical operations, and, as always, the truth of the algorithm is in the listening.

THE NEXT STAGE

Another fascinating example from the Airwindows stable is the recent Interstage plug-in (www.airwindows.com/interstage), which aims to sound like running your audio through an ‘optimal analogue stage’. It offers no adjustable parameters at all, but performs its magic by reshaping the low end, similar to that of a capacitor-coupled circuit, while the highs runs into ‘active component electronic limits’, by ‘restricting treble slews based on the general amount of energy in the circuit’. Essentially you’ll hear no change if you don’t need what it’s doing, but Interstage will kick in when it detects excessively digital bass and treble in your audio, especially once audio levels are approaching 0dBFS. Once again, the results are subtle, but nevertheless fascinating, and when switching Interstage in and out blind, I’ve often found myself preferring it in circuit due to its goal of converting any overtly digital sounds into more analogue equivalents.

WINDING THINGS UP

Another aspect of audio components that can add cumulative mojo is the sound of transformers, and in the plug-in arena I’ve been impressed by Kazrog’s True Iron plug-in (kazrog.com), which models the euphonic effects of audio transformers. Unless you push the parameters quite hard for special saturated effects, the results are again very subtle, yet once again if you add a single instance of True Iron on each of your playback channels the cumulative results slowly build into a warm roundness that fits beautifully with many musical genres. True Iron can also knock the perfect edges off clean softsynth sounds for a little more grit and attitude.

One important aspect with all cumulative plug-in use is to be careful about gain-staging. All the euphonic effects described in this column will vary considerably with input level, so it’s important to spend some time discovering the ‘sweet spots’. After all, we’re only looking for subtle changes for each instance. I don’t necessarily add exactly the same treatment to every channel either, as some (bass instruments and drums for instance) may benefit from more transformer warmth, while others blossom with console tweaks. It can be a good idea, once you’ve got everything as you want, to render the song, then temporarily deactivate all the mojo plug-ins and render it again, so you can hear the difference properly and get your ears more finely attuned to these ‘analogue improvements’.