Lucky enough to squeeze into a session with Mike Stavrou yesterday. Over the years I've spoken with Mike several times and I'm an ardent reader of Stav's Word in a local audio magazine. As interesting a genius / madman as he is I'd ignored most of what he has to say as I don't mix music.
Yesterdays session although heavily oriented towards mixing had some real gems in it that are applicable to what many of us do. I'll not give away all of them, you'll have to buy a copy of Mike's book for that. It's not cheap but you could get a significant return on your investment in the money you could save on monitor speakers, room treatment or simply making a cheap mike sound like a million dollars. A couple of the gems:
A microphone is not a camera, it's an eyedropper. You need to find the right pixel of air for it to sample.
People rarely speak or sing straight out of their mouth. Mike pulled off a great party trick with this one. He got 4 of the audience up on stage, he asked for people with more cavities in their teeth on one side of their head than the other. He then listens to them make an "ooo" sound and positions them left to right after moving his head around their mouth. Knowing which side of their mouth a singer or speaker favours means you can arrange a group of singers around a single mic to get the best sounding vocals or place a mic to get the best sounding speech for a VO.
The party trick was he'd managed to arrange 3 of the 4 of them according to which side of their mouth had the most cavities, wierd but probably has something to do with how we chew on one side of our mouth when we had a tooth ache.
One final tip. When trying to judge your sound dim the lights or close your eyes. Do not look at your computer monitors. The whole thrust of what Mike has to say is learn to use and trust your ears. They're the cheapest bit of audio kit you can buy and they can tell you things the most expensive tools will not. Couple your ears to your brain with an understanding of how sound is like a "flame" and you can discover some amazing things.
I'll add a bit about Vegas, just to keep this less OT'ish. One trick Mike explained was about overdubs that goes back to the days of R2R decks with variable playback speed. Most of the room was left scratching their head because it's impossible in most audio systems and hardware to change the underlying hardware sample rate by a fractional amount. If you've got Vegas, well you still can't change the sample rate so easily but Vegas does provide a mechanism for achieving the same thing.
Link for those who want buy a copy of the book here.
Bob.
Yesterdays session although heavily oriented towards mixing had some real gems in it that are applicable to what many of us do. I'll not give away all of them, you'll have to buy a copy of Mike's book for that. It's not cheap but you could get a significant return on your investment in the money you could save on monitor speakers, room treatment or simply making a cheap mike sound like a million dollars. A couple of the gems:
A microphone is not a camera, it's an eyedropper. You need to find the right pixel of air for it to sample.
People rarely speak or sing straight out of their mouth. Mike pulled off a great party trick with this one. He got 4 of the audience up on stage, he asked for people with more cavities in their teeth on one side of their head than the other. He then listens to them make an "ooo" sound and positions them left to right after moving his head around their mouth. Knowing which side of their mouth a singer or speaker favours means you can arrange a group of singers around a single mic to get the best sounding vocals or place a mic to get the best sounding speech for a VO.
The party trick was he'd managed to arrange 3 of the 4 of them according to which side of their mouth had the most cavities, wierd but probably has something to do with how we chew on one side of our mouth when we had a tooth ache.
One final tip. When trying to judge your sound dim the lights or close your eyes. Do not look at your computer monitors. The whole thrust of what Mike has to say is learn to use and trust your ears. They're the cheapest bit of audio kit you can buy and they can tell you things the most expensive tools will not. Couple your ears to your brain with an understanding of how sound is like a "flame" and you can discover some amazing things.
I'll add a bit about Vegas, just to keep this less OT'ish. One trick Mike explained was about overdubs that goes back to the days of R2R decks with variable playback speed. Most of the room was left scratching their head because it's impossible in most audio systems and hardware to change the underlying hardware sample rate by a fractional amount. If you've got Vegas, well you still can't change the sample rate so easily but Vegas does provide a mechanism for achieving the same thing.
Link for those who want buy a copy of the book here.
Bob.