I posted this elsewhere, but I figured folks here would be interested too.
I attended a great VASST seminar yesterday on Music in the Editing Suite. It was given by DMN's own Jeffrey Fisher at B&H in New York.
http://www.vasst.com/?v=attention_audio.htm
A lot of what he said about the use of music and psychology of music was intuitive, but seeing a pro demonstrate them helped solidify these principles.
One example of how music affects image was the title sequence for a movie with the same image but three different soundtracks. The image was just an empty road with a car coming down it. Depending on the soundtrack, the movie seemed like: A-a light comedy; B-an serious drama; or C-a horror movie.
Other things I came away from the seminar with:
He treats all audio including voice and sound effects as music, scoring them if you will.
Create space in the mix for your sounds. The example he gave was you can't the scream, the gunshot and a car's squealing brakes all happen at the same time because they will cancel each other out and the impact will be lessened.
You can create space for them three ways.
Temporal-space them out in time, slide your sounds just before or after each other
By frequency -- you can have low frequency and high frequency sounds happen at the same time, because they won't cancel each other.
Spatially -- Put one sound in one channel and one in the other. This is especially true in Surround
Consonants are what determine clarity in human speech. They occur at around 2Khz. You can create space for consonants by EQuing your music. Create a band at 2K that is about 1.5 octaves wide and pull this down about 4 decibels. You can also do the same thing to your voice track, but this time raise it a couple of decibels. When you do something like this, remember that it's the mix that counts. The music by itself may sound wierd with this EQ, but listen to it with the voice track and it should sound fine.
He made a point that anyone who has gone beyond novice in Acid can create a competent track. But you want to move beyond competently laying down a music track to someone who can score the video: making your audio do even more. The phrase he used was having a music track "just lay there." He showed an example from a promo piece that he redid the audio for. His version was way more alive. Some of the changes were simple echo effects and changes in volume, but the real change was focusing on the emotion of the piece and not being satisfied with just having put music underneath the visuals.
Best of all is he said this seminar would soon be on training DVD soon.
I attended a great VASST seminar yesterday on Music in the Editing Suite. It was given by DMN's own Jeffrey Fisher at B&H in New York.
http://www.vasst.com/?v=attention_audio.htm
A lot of what he said about the use of music and psychology of music was intuitive, but seeing a pro demonstrate them helped solidify these principles.
One example of how music affects image was the title sequence for a movie with the same image but three different soundtracks. The image was just an empty road with a car coming down it. Depending on the soundtrack, the movie seemed like: A-a light comedy; B-an serious drama; or C-a horror movie.
Other things I came away from the seminar with:
He treats all audio including voice and sound effects as music, scoring them if you will.
Create space in the mix for your sounds. The example he gave was you can't the scream, the gunshot and a car's squealing brakes all happen at the same time because they will cancel each other out and the impact will be lessened.
You can create space for them three ways.
Temporal-space them out in time, slide your sounds just before or after each other
By frequency -- you can have low frequency and high frequency sounds happen at the same time, because they won't cancel each other.
Spatially -- Put one sound in one channel and one in the other. This is especially true in Surround
Consonants are what determine clarity in human speech. They occur at around 2Khz. You can create space for consonants by EQuing your music. Create a band at 2K that is about 1.5 octaves wide and pull this down about 4 decibels. You can also do the same thing to your voice track, but this time raise it a couple of decibels. When you do something like this, remember that it's the mix that counts. The music by itself may sound wierd with this EQ, but listen to it with the voice track and it should sound fine.
He made a point that anyone who has gone beyond novice in Acid can create a competent track. But you want to move beyond competently laying down a music track to someone who can score the video: making your audio do even more. The phrase he used was having a music track "just lay there." He showed an example from a promo piece that he redid the audio for. His version was way more alive. Some of the changes were simple echo effects and changes in volume, but the real change was focusing on the emotion of the piece and not being satisfied with just having put music underneath the visuals.
Best of all is he said this seminar would soon be on training DVD soon.