Intern Amar Singh - Week 3

It’s been another pretty eventful week at Tapeworks. I got to help out with some more recording, mixing, and got to end the week watching how Bill masters a CD album. I think I’m also starting to get a better handle on the routing and signal flow in his studio.

The a capella song that I’ve been working on is finally starting to sound closer to finished. I wrapped up my Melodyne tuning for the sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses. I then went on to do another pass to fix some of the rhythm. The song is in 6/8, so I was making sure to listen closely to the eighth note with a click to hear how the singers sat in that triplet kind of groove.

I probably could’ve tried to do tuning and rhythm at the same time, but I tend to default to doing one type of task and getting it done before moving on to the next thing. I’ll probably be able to do both as I get more comfortable with my Melodyne workflow.

Once that was all finished, I added back in the lead vocal to hear how it fitted in with everyone else and made some adjustments. I used a bit more “vibes” rather than the grid and visuals Melodyne was showing me to adjust the lead’s tuning. The performance had a lot of expressiveness from things like vibrato, pitch bends, and riffs, so I wanted to make sure I retained that while I was going in nudging pitches that were a little out of tune.

As I began to start the mix, Melodyne was giving me a bit of trouble. Some of the changes I made might’ve not properly saved, so I had to go back and redo some of my work. I made sure to render my tracks afterwards so I wouldn’t lose my changes again-

Doing the mix was pretty simple in some ways and tricky in others. Getting balances of each part wasn’t too bad. I was just trying to make sure each voice could be clearly heard. The tricky part though was making sure voices didn’t stick out too much. Some takes were just a little louder than others which made some voices stick out for parts of the song. The quality of the voices, like their breathiness, was also pretty varied, so I was trying to figure out how I could pair voices together and pan them out to compliment each other.

I was also struggling a bit to figure out what kind of processing to do on the vocals, especially the lead. For me, mixing vocals feels kind of open ended. There’s a lot of different ways to go about it and get a good result, so I end up getting kind of stuck on what to do. I ended up just using stock plugins to do some eq, compression, and de-essing on the lead. I also used a long 5 second hall reverb for the whole group. I’ll have to be careful that it doesn’t make the mix too muddy, but I think having the singers in that kind of large space sounds pretty cool for the song.

I’ll probably end up handing over the mix to Bill at some point to have him finish it up. It was pretty helpful going onto the Tapeworks website to listen to the other a capella mixes Bill has done to get an idea of what kind of sound to shoot for.

I spent the rest of the week mainly helping out and watching Bill work on recordings and mixes.

I got to see my first ADR session. Well, it wasn’t exactly ADR since what was being recorded wasn’t being synced to an actor’s mouth movements on screen. The video was more like a guide for the narration being recorded, and helped give the talent an idea of how to perform the lines from the script. It was a cool session to watch. I got to see how Bill tracked takes and quickly edited them to the video so the people involved could see how the scene played out. It was also interesting to see how everyone interacted with each other over Zoom to try and convey the ideas they had about the lines and how they were to be performed.

There’s going to be a voice over session this weekend that’ll be helping out with. I helped Bill set up for it during the week, and I feel like I have a pretty good idea of how things are routed for the most part. I was able to explain back the signal flow from the mic to the DAW and the other stuff in between with some explanations from Bill when I got confused by something. I got to learn a bit about Source Connect as well which I haven’t used before. From what I understand, it lets people work together remotely to send high quality audio to one another and some other stuff.

The mixing I got to watch Bill do this week was interesting. He was going through multiple revisions of one mix based on what the artists were requesting. We had another client who had multitracks of some songs he recorded as well. Bill was able to balance mixing the song with his ideas and tastes while also letting the client have control to take the mix in the direction they’d like it.

The last thing I did this week with Bill was watch how he did his mastering. There was a client who came in with mixes of choir songs. I got to see how the songs got ordered the way they were going to be for the CD album. Then he went on to treat the mixes with a bit of EQ and reverb. Some of the recordings were done live with an audience, so attention was taken to fixing noises and making sure the beginnings and endings of the song were clean. It feels like a task that takes a fair bit of concentration and focus to do, but we were also chatting about different things over the few hours we were going through the songs-

So that about covers it for this week. There’s still more work to be done! I give a tired hooray to that… but it should be fun and interesting to help out with.

I realize I haven’t actually shown a picture of myself doing any work in the studio. I guess I haven’t thought to take out my phone to snap a selfie of myself at the console or in the live room. I’ll show a picture of me doing some mixing for my capstone project at UHart for now- Credit to my friend Nate who took the photo and did a lot of additional video and picture work for my capstone. Hopefully we’ll have a cool documentary chronicling that experience at some point soon.