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In this article...
Rescued This Month...
Spill, Balance & Phase
Parallel Compression
Remix Reactions
Final Tweaks
Minimal Mixing
SOS Awards
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Here you can see how the instruments were set up for Jesper's recording, with the bass isolated from the
drums and piano using part-glazed screens.
We help a home recordist on a budget to add that elusive polish to his jazz-
trio recordings.
Many of the songs sent in to Mix Rescue do indeed need salvaging, but occasionally something
comes in that makes a pleasant break from the norm. Jesper Buhl's recording of his jazz trio
was one such welcome submission, where he had managed to capture respectable signals
from the ensemble performance, despite budget constraints, by careful placement and
isolation of the piano, upright bass and drums within his home studio, which is a 7.5 x 7.5m
converted garage.
The bass player, Rico De Jeer, was set up towards one corner of the carpeted room, allowing
him to be isolated pretty e ciently from the other instruments using three large studio panels
(complete with glazed sections to preserve sight lines). The drums and piano were set up more
towards the other side of the room, and Jesper had tried to reduce the levels of drum spill on
the piano mics by turning the instrument so that its lid opened in the opposite direction, as well
as by arranging four 2 x 4-foot absorber panels around it.
The drums were played by Chris Barchet and recorded with a pair of Oktava MK012 cardioid
small-diaphragm condensers running through Rane MS1B preamps into an Emu 1820M
soundcard, the audio interface for Jesper's Cubase SX2 PC recording system (itself isolated in a
purpose-built box to reduce noise). In addition to these mics, the bass drum had an AKG D112
in front of it and a Superlux ECOH6A large-diaphragm electret mic on the batter-head side.
There was a Shure SM57 on the snare, as well as a separate small-diaphragm condenser on the
hi-hat although session gremlins ate the hi-hat signal before it could reach the recorder, so
this last mic's signal wasn't available for mixing. All of the close mics were ampli ed by a
Behringer ADA8000 preamp/converter before reaching the audio interface.
Another Superlux ECOH6A microphone was set up in front of the bass, after Jesper had tried
and rejected both an SE Electronics SE2200A and a Studio Projects B3 in this role, while his Readers' Ads
Grotriam-Steinweg baby grand piano had two Studio Projects C3 mics (in cardioid mode) in a
spaced stereo con guration over the strings. These mics also passed through the ADA8000. VIEW ALL ADS CREATE FREE AD
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Jesper's original mix was already sensibly balanced and by no means bad but I felt that
the drums seemed a bit too wide and the bass wasn't quite present enough. There was also a
slightly unnatural reverb added to the piano, and it seemed rather 'stuck on'. So I asked him to
send over his original multitrack les and loaded them into my own Cubase SX2 system to see
if there was a better result to be had.
www.jesperbuhl.com
www.ricodejeer.com
Despite Jesper's e orts to isolate the instruments, the bottom line is that spill is an inherent
part of recordings like this. With so many mics picking up the same sounds (either directly or as
spill), phase-cancellation between the di erent mic signals becomes an important factor, so it's
pointless trying to process any mic in isolation. For this reason, my rst real mixing task was
simply to fade up the piano, bass and drum-overhead mics to give a rough balance, and then
listen to how they interacted with di erent polarity settings. After a little experimentation, Rupert Neve Designs - 535 Diode Bridge Compressor - AES
however, I liked the default settings best another point on Jesper's score-card! so I turned 2017
my attention, rst of all, to rounding out the balance of the drums coming through the Uploaded 1 week 3 hours ago
overheads, by using the close mics.
The bass drum was most obviously missing in action, so I checked out the two relevant close
mics. The AKG D112 at the front of the kick presented a rather unappealing and coloured
sound (which I'd probably have tried to remedy on the session in Jesper's position), so I faded
up the batter-side mic instead. This didn't have the same amount of body to it as the D112, and
also included an undesirable low-frequency ringing, but the spill from the rest of the kit was
very well behaved indeed, and the resonance was quickly taken care of with an 8dB notch at
100Hz. Again, I checked the polarity of this mic against the rest of the mix, but this time found
that an inverted setting gave a more solid sound.
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As it happened, the level of snare spill on this
mic was so high that I found myself reaching
almost instinctively for some processing to
reduce it. However, after a moment's thought I
realised that this snare spill was, in fact, exactly
what the overheads needed to bring the snare
forward in the mix, so I stepped away from the
plug-in menu with my hands in the air... In the
event, this snare spill was something of a
stroke of luck, as the snare sound coming
through the close mic was a bit dodgy woolly
and resonant, with some nasty spill
emphasising the stick noise from the ride
A spaced pair of Studio Projects C3 mics were used to
cymbal. Although the drum sound was now
capture the piano sound, while four acoustic
pretty much in the right ball-park, I tried mixing absorber panels were arranged to try to reduce spill
in the D112 as well to see what it would sound from the drums.
like in context, and discovered that a little bit of
it gave a more rounded sound to the kick, once I'd found the best polarity setting.
Parallel Compression
With the majority of the mix balance in place, I could concentrate on some processing. My main
aim was to try to increase the sustain and detail of each of the parts, and for this I turned to
parallel compression in other words, using compression as a send e ect rather than as an
insert. The advantage of the parallel approach is that you can smooth the levels without as
much impact on the transients and performance dynamics that are so important to acoustic
music styles.
Conversely, with the bass compressor I cut a decibel at 360Hz, using a low shelf to highlight the
upper harmonics a little more. I also increased this compressor's ratio to 2:1 and switched to a
release of 65ms, to make the sustain e ect more overt. Despite this, the odd note would
occasionally poke out unduly, so I bussed the compressed and uncompressed signals together
and applied a traditional insert compressor to the resulting Group channel, just to catch these
few moments (for the rest of the time the insert compressor wasn't doing anything at all).
Remix Reactions
Jesper Buhl: "Even though my original mix wasn't exactly screwed up (reading SOS for the
last 10 years must have paid o to some extent!), it was quite obvious that something
was lacking. It didn't sound exactly like a record, only quite close, but at the same time I
couldn't think of anything I wanted to change in my nal mix.
"When Mike had nished working his magic, everything sounded more de ned and
punchy, as if all of the instruments were suddenly out in the room belonging together,
and not behind screens. A friend has compared it favourably to some of his favourite
'50s jazz recordings, saying that it has precisely the same atmosphere and sound, and I
tend to agree. 'More powerful' is another description several of my music-playing
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buddies have used. Everybody loves the new panning (my drums were way too wide) and
the piano also somehow seems wider and more impressive.
"I've already learned a ton of new tricks for example, using compression on the sends
instead of on the inserts but it's going to take a while before I've digested all the advice
on o er here! This has been a real eye-opener and I'm grateful to SOS, and Mike in
particular, for giving me this opportunity. As a bonus, it seems that Mike and I have been
using the same version of Cubase, and he's o ered to send me his Cubase Project le so
that I can use his settings for my entire CD everything was recorded in one session, so
all I should have to do is change the automation for each track. Isn't that just great?"
Final Tweaks
The general sound was now shaping up nicely, with the parallel compression adding a nice
sense of immediacy and atmosphere, so I bussed all the tracks for each instrument to three
Group channels, to allow easier control over the relative levels. I was now keen to try to 'glue'
the instruments together a little more, as well as creating the impression of a slightly larger
space, so I red up Christian Knu nke's SIR convolution reverb plug-in and surfed through
some impulse responses until I found a three-second 'empty club' preset that sounded
promising. Because SIR doesn't o er true-stereo processing, I reduced the send to the e ect to
mono, to avoid any odd stereo artifacts that might have drawn undue attention to the e ect.
A little more fader automation was the next step, to push up the levels of the bass and drum
solos when they occurred. In the case of the drum solos, I also turned down the piano mics a
touch, in order to reduce the amount of spill/ambience slightly in these sections. As a nal
polish on the mix, I used Buzzroom's Gene Comp to apply some low-threshold 1.1:1-ratio bus
compression and followed it up with GVSTs GMax limiter, skimming only the very loudest peaks
with a short (50ms) release, to enable me to achieve a little bit of extra loudness.
Minimal Mixing
To be honest, with acoustic music like this the majority of the work needs to happen in the live
room, so Jesper's e orts while tracking made it possible for me to concentrate on polishing
(rather than salvaging) his tracks at mixdown. In this kind of happy situation, the mix
processing can be kept subtle and precisely directed (with fewer undesirable side-e ects), and
the natural spill between the instruments will often work in your favour, giving a lively, organic
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quality to the nal result. This project also serves as a powerful reminder of just how much can
be achieved through great musicianship and common-sense mic technique even when using
budget equipment.
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