Intern Amar Singh - Week 5

This week was my last full week interning at Tapeworks. I’ll just have a few more hours to do before I’m all set. It timed out pretty well too because a lot of the work that I’ve started is getting wrapped up now.

It took a while, but the a capella mixes are finally done. Well at least the first versions of them are. The group is going to have the chance to listen to them and request changes. We might have to tweak things like volume, fix notes, or change the reverb depending on what they want.

The issue Bill has had in the past working with larger a capella groups is that multiple members would ask for different changes. That made it hard to manage everyone’s requests and get a finished mix. So to deal with that, Bill usually has one person from the group act as the spokesperson so the communication is more clear and easier to handle.

I was a little disappointed to see Bill make changes to the previous mixes I worked on. It kind of made me feel like my mix choices weren’t up to Bill’s standards and gave my ego a little bit of a punch. I get that Bill has a certain sound he wants the mixes to have though, and I try to keep my ego in check by reminding myself that my mixing isn’t just for myself, but other people.

Although, Bill did keep one of the last mixes I worked on pretty much as is, which made me feel pretty satisfied. That one was a cover of “Until I Found You” by Stephen Sanchez. I managed to get that done in a few hours.

One thing that helped me get that mix done was following Bill’s mix process and trying to match his sound. When he uses reverb with this group, he likes to use different reverbs for the choir and the lead. The reverb generally tends to be kind of long, and the pre-delay for the lead tends to be kind of long as well, which I think helps give a big sense of space while keeping the lead close to the listener.

He also prefers creating individual sends from each track to the reverb rather than creating something like a sum of multiple tracks and sending from that. Using individual sends gives him more control on how much reverb each member of the choir gets.

I then helped Bill out with mastering by listening back to the mixes and making notes on things I was hearing. I went back to adjust one of the mixes, which was kind of tricky to do since there was already a fair amount of processing on the tracks and the master. Bill then took the mixes and used some EQ, mastering plugins, and limiting to finish up the mastering.

Our program at school didn’t go very in depth into how the mastering process works, so it’s interesting to watch how Bill does it. The mastering we did for these mixes was pretty quick though since the primary goal was just to get a pretty decent sound for the songs so the a capella group could listen to them.

One thing I was wondering about was how limiting could affect a mix. I like to use volume automation to create bits of dynamic contrast in my mix, but I imagine limiting could potentially make those changes less noticeable. Some genres of music use limiting as part of their sound though. Limiting is something I'll have to try and add to my toolbox.

This week I also got to see Bill track jazz vocals. Another engineer created a session with the bounced mixes of different songs for us to do overdubs to. It was interesting to see how things like headphone volume, singing technique with the microphone, and the band’s performance affected how the vocalist performed. One of the trickier songs to overdub had an intro with only guitar accompaniment played with rubato, which made it more of a challenge to follow along with.

There was another session afterwards to select takes for each of the songs. The vocalist was kind of tough on herself when reviewing the takes, but I understand that she'd want to create the best performance possible. The vocalist did a great job though and showed a wide range of skill.

I think that covers a good chunk of what I did this week. I’m not sure what work I’ll be getting up to next week at the studio, but once I’m all done with my internship requirements, I think I might go back to working on some of the other projects I have. I’ve been doing a bit of video editing recently and have started to learn how to rotoscope. It's been taking me a while to finish but I think I’ll be able to create a silly visual effect with it.