To Mix or Not to Mix? That is the Question

In the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life, there is an unforgettable scene in an upscale French restaurant featuring this exchange between John Cleese’s fawning waiter and Terry Jones’ more-than-morbidly obese patron, Mr. Creosote:

“Today we have for appetizers moules mariniers, pâté de fois gras, beluga caviar, eggs benedict, tarte de poivre—that’s leek tart—frogs’ legs amandine, or oeufs de cailles—little quails’ eggs on a bed of pureéd mushrooms. It’s very delicate, very subtle.”

“I’ll have the lot,” replies Mr. Creosote.

“A wise choice, monsieur. And now, how would you like it served—all mixed up together in a bucket?”

“Yeah . . . with the eggs on top.”

While the humour in the scene is partly visual, the Pythons’ unique stamp of taking things to the brink of the ridiculous, and then vaulting over it, contrasts the list of the individual, highly refined dishes on the menu—representing the pinnacle of classic French cuisine—and the way these “very delicate, very subtle” elements are offered to the patron in a gross, vulgar, and repulsive manner, “all mixed up together in a bucket.”

Of course, no-one would willingly order a meal this way, much less be served in this fashion by a trained professional. Yet, that is much the way sound is often presented to theatre patrons: all mixed up together, with the eggs—or rather, the voices—on top. Occasionally delicate, not often subtle.

What is at issue here is the very notion of mixing, of combining disparate elements into a single channel (center cluster), two channels (L, R), a combination of these (L, C, R) or perhaps even on very rare occasions, a surround mix of four or five channels.

While mixing a large number of individual audio signals together into a few channels may be a very real requirement for the limited channel count of broadcast radio and television, as well as channel-restricted media such as consumer audio playback systems, this is certainly not the case for theatre and other staged entertainment. Until recently, however, theatrical and similar live events have largely been mixed in much the same way as broadcasts and recorded music.

This may be attributed in part to the large overlap in the designs of traditional recording, broadcast and live consoles; schools teaching audio (i.e., “recording schools”) continue to focus on the art and techniques of the mixdown; even one of the audio industry’s leading magazines proudly heralds the practice in its name, Mix. Originating in broadcast and recording sessions involving multiple microphones, and refined in multitrack recording studios producing mono or stereo masters, mixing has become entrenched in the industry and in the minds of many who dream of working in it, to the point where it’s almost as if no other way of working with sound is even remotely conceivable.

A great many shows are presented as if the audience were listening to a gargantuan stereo system, with massive line arrays hung to the left and right of the stage. Now this might not be inappropriate for a touring band well known from its recordings or for a big, dynamic rock musical where the design calls for a larger-than-life aspect.

Even so, many of the blockbuster musicals from the past quarter century benefited greatly from the creativity of such esteemed sound designers as Olivier Award winner Mick Potter, who, in the quest for more natural sound, have opted for separate vocal and orchestra mixes, striving simultaneously for clarity in the voices and power in the orchestra. Moreover, two voice mixes are sometimes derived, with one going to a duplicate set of loudspeakers in an A-B configuration pioneered in 1988 by Martin Levan for Aspects of Love, to eliminate electrical summing of mic signals and the ensuing phase problems that arise when performers are in close proximity to each other’s microphones.

For other production styles, however, an approach based on mixing may not be the most appropriate technique for conveying the nuances of theatre—including musical theatre, where sound systems have become ubiquitous—if the purpose of sound reinforcement is to allow every performer’s voice to be heard as it would unamplified in an optimum seat.

Leap year and drop-frame time code are conceptually the same

For those in the media production industries, February 29th is a good day to revisit drop-frame SMPTE time code, because both leap year and drop-frame time code came into being for the sole purpose of reconciling two different time bases on which we do things with mundane regularity.

Take the calendar first: our calendar simply charts the sequence of the individual days that comprise a single year. The day is based, of course, on a single rotation of the earth on its axis, whereas the year is based on a single revolution of the earth around the sun. Rotation and revolution are the two different time bases on which our calendar is constructed.

Since it takes about 365.25 days for the earth to revolve around the sun, we collect four of those quarter days and add them together into a single day—February 29—that appears on the calendar once every four years.

We do this because there's no such thing as a quarter-day: you couldn't start a New Year at 6:00 a.m. After all, a day is a day and cannot be partitioned like that. It's an integer.

It's important to see that the concept of the yearly calendar comprises 366 days—February 29 is not imaginary. But rather than adding it every four years, what we are really doing is dropping it from the calendar in every year that is not a multiple of four. If the year is not divisible by 4, then we drop February 29 from our count of days in that year.

It's exactly the same with drop-frame time code, where frames are analogous to days, and hours to years. A video frame is a whole thing, an integer, and we count 30 of them in one second. But the rate at which they proceed is a bit less than 30 per second, more like 29.97 frames per second.

This is the same sort of fractional discrepancy that exists in the annual rate of 365.25 days per year.

We deal with it the same way, by dropping 2 frames from the count at the very beginning of every minute that is not a multiple of 10. In that first second, there are only 28 frames.

So frames 00 and 01 simply do not exist at the beginning of every minute of time code that doesn't have a zero at the end of it (10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 00 minutes being the exceptions), just as February 29 does not exist in any year that can't be divided by 4. It's as simple as that.

Why go to the bother of doing this? For the calendar, it's long been considered important that the seasons start at roughly the same time every year: if we didn't have February 29 as a corrective, then the beginning of Spring, for example, would progress steadily back through February, January, December, and so on as the years rolled by.

For producers, it's important that the time displayed by your time code reader agrees with the real-time clock on the control room wall. Without drop-frame time code, a one-hour program as measured by your time code would actually run 3 seconds and 18 frames too long, and that would wreak havoc with broadcast schedules.

Note that what we are NOT doing is cutting out frames from our program and leaving them on the cutting room floor, as some of my former students at the Toronto Film School used to believe. Those "dropped" frames are simply never there in the first place, just as February 29 will not "be there" in 2013, 2014, and 2015. The calendar works as "drop-day" code.

The takeaway from this blog entry is that if you can intuitively grasp the concept of leap year, then you've already got the essence of drop-frame time code. Conceptually, they are one and the same.

If your glass is more beautiful than the wine, change the wine

So says noted wine writer Tony Aspler.

Owners of smaller home and project studios who are tempted to hire top-notch professional recording engineers to help ramp up their business risk seeing clients follow these engineers to better studios.

I've seen this happen time and time again. Home and project studio owners need to understand that this is almost always inevitable when their reach starts to exceed their grasp and they want to compete with the big boys.

It may be prudent for smaller studio owners to consider a significant upgrade of their rooms and equipment before enlisting the services of established outside recording engineers.

It won't be the engineers' fault if clients seek to follow them to greener pastures.

When a studio won't release the tracks you've paid for

Songwriters and musicians who use the services of small, home-based studios—and, for that matter, established commercial studios—would be well advised to establish the terms, conditions and policies of the studio before undertaking any recording.

I’m writing this because a beginning songwriter has come to me for advice. He is having a hard time getting a home studio owner to release his tracks, even though he has paid his bill in full—over $13,000! The songwriter wants to take the basic tracks of three songs that he recorded at this particular home studio to another, larger commercial studio for editing, mixing and mastering, but the owner of the home studio is refusing to release the material.

By way of explanation, the home studio owner wrote to me saying that he is “not going to let him take the files out of this studio in the condition they are. How he is going to come up with a better mix than any one of our engineers is beyond me to imagine. The files simply aren't ready to be exported or given away. Many guitar and other instrumental parts remain unedited and comped so even if he wanted them they are in no condition to give away.”

(The songwriter has made it clear that editing and comping are among the tasks he wants to complete at the new studio.)

The home studio owner then goes on to say, “We are not willing to give the files out. This is not normal practice. If he really wanted the files he'd have to buy us out but at this time I am not willing to even consider this.”

I’m not sure I understand why the owner thinks that releasing tracks that have been paid for is not “normal practice.” It’s also not clear to me what he means about the songwriter having to “buy us out,” given that he paid his bill in full over six months ago!

The studio owner concludes, “If this project goes out of the studio I have no guarantee if it will be mixed to a certain standard and I've brought in some heavy players that [the songwriter] got at cost.”

Why the studio owner considers it his business that the songs will be “mixed to a certain standard” is beyond me. That is not his responsibility. And the part about providing players “at cost” seems to indicate that the studio owner is in the habit of marking up session players’ fees and then taking a piece for himself. Maybe that’s how the cost of three unfinished demos climbed to beyond $13,000!

This might never have become an issue if the songwriter had clearly established the ground rules at the outset. At this point, it looks like a case for small claims court.

Songwriters be warned: Make sure you know at the outset what policies, practices or procedures a studio considers to be normative before you record a single note there. Second, make it your business to pay session players directly. Don’t accept an all-in deal with the studio, where you pay everything to the studio. In fact, it should be your job—or your producer’s job—to hire the session musicians in the first place.

I know of one instance where a guitar player was unable to attend a session because his wife went into labour that morning with their first child. I was there when the studio owner actually called the rental department of a local music store (Long & McQuade in Toronto) to find an on-the-spot replacement. When the replacement guitarist arrived, it became painfully apparent that he couldn’t read the chart. In fact, he couldn’t even tune his guitar, and he was sent away with return cab fare paid by—you guessed it—the songwriter!

At that point, the songwriter should have called it quits, but he was too cowed by the studio owner to voice his displeasure.

My final recommendation is that songwriters should bring a USB drive—preferably 8 GB or 16 GB—to their sessions, so that they can take a backup of their recordings away with them—provided, of course, that their account with the studio is paid up to date. After all, possession of the recorded material is the only security a studio has against non-payment for services rendered.

I have not named the offending studio in this blog entry, but readers who wish to continue the discussion can email me at buzz@abcbuzz.com.

When a studio's clients want to leave—and take you with them

As a freelance recording engineer, what do you do when artists approach you directly and ask you to produce their recordings in your own right, after you've made their acquantance in someone else's studio and on someone else's dime?

This is a situation I've found myself in a few times over the years. On two occasions, clients told me that the studio we met in didn't sound good and wanted to go elsewhere—with me—to record in the future. In another case, a performer said that the producer was too hyper, "not laid back enough," and could we record somewhere else where the atmosphere was more relaxed. Similarly, in another instance, an artist complained of being stressed out in the presence of the studio owner, and consequently couldn't turn in a first-rate performance.

When this started happening, I thought it best to speak frankly with the producer or studio owner, one of whom told me that none of his other freelancers would ever dream of "poaching" his clients, whose business he had worked diligently to acquire over months and years.

I pointed out that I wasn't in the habit of poaching clients—the industry is far too small and such behaviour is ruinous to one's reputation. I suggested that those who were dissatisfied were eventually going to go elsewhere anyway, and rather than lose their business entirely, why not work out a finder's fee arrangement for him—call it a commission or kick-back if you will—so that his role in securing the business was recognized tangibly.

He rejected this suggestion out of hand, insisting they were HIS clients, and that I should endeavour to convince them to stay despite their expressed concerns.

Well, no one is automatically entitled to a client's business for life, and as the saying goes, whatever it took to get you here isn't enough to keep you here—you're only as good as your last gig. Clients are free to go where they will.

Knowing that some clients may approach competent staff members directly in an attempt to secure their services at more favourable rates, some employers insist that their employees sign a non-compete agreement.

But this doesn't wash with many freelancers, something studio owners should bear in mind when building a business based on out-sourcing the work. It's a two-edged sword—freelancers are not employees, and do not enjoy the same benefits and security that employees do, and turnabout is fair play.

Some savvy studio owners offer freelance engineers a piece of the action—participation in the business akin to stock options—in order to make it more attractive for freelancers to discourage the studio's clients from going elsewhere. I have suggested this on several occasions, with mixed results.

In the end, it's difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a good working relationship with a studio when its clients become dissatisfied and want you to take them elsewhere to record. But for a studio owner, recognizing that you're in a business relationship with freelance engineers, and not a social one, is a necessary first step in arriving at a business solution to what might otherwise become a thorny personal problem.

For a studio owner, it should serve as a wake-up call that all is not as it should be when clients express their dissatisfaction to a sympathetic ear behind the board. The solution may be as simple as staying away from the session, however tempting it may be for a studio owner to participate in the proceedings. From a "strictly-business" perspective, this is the most straightforward solution.

In the case of a home or project studio, this is not as easily accomplished, and sharing a business with a home may open up the studio operation to a level of personal micromanagement that may be detrimental to its success, exposing clients to everything from a simple request to remove their shoes, to disagreeable cooking odors emanating from the kitchen.

When home studio rates are well below prevailing commercial rates, such irritants may well be tolerable, but if home studio owners set their rates equivalent to—or higher than—commercial operations, they may need to adjust their expectations and behaviour accordingly.