Brief Summary
What the performer hears when playing affects their performance. The Engineer can influence a performance by manipulating the performer’s monitor mix and while the relative levels in the mix are the primary tool at their disposal, it doesn’t end with volume.
Going Deeper
We said before on the blog that a great recording needs a great monitor mix. It affects how people play and the performance affects everything which follows. This is something I was reminded of when playing a gig with my band on Saturday. For practical reasons we try to keep things simple and when you play the kind of pub gigs we play, anything as luxurious as a proper PA system and an engineer to mix us isn’t on the cards. The sound is from the backline equipment with a rather inadequate PA which is strictly for vocals. The sound we get in the room isn’t at all bad but the thing which is a persistent issue is what we hear on stage. We can’t really hear each other. We know this but all the potential solutions involve complexity and expense which, as a strictly non-professional band, just aren’t going to happen.
What does this have to do with professional audio? Well the issues I was experiencing at this friend’s wedding in Falmouth have implications for the headphone mixes I set up in the studio, and it’s really useful to experience first hand the consequences these choices have on a performer every now and again.
I play keyboards in the band and rather than put the keys through the, rather inadequate, PA which is handling the vocals I have my own amplification. I know I could run a little bit of keys through the PA but for various reasons I don’t. This results in me usually hearing my keys a lot louder than I would choose to, as I am so close to them relative to the audience. This, combined with, in our regular layout, the guitarist’s open backed valve amp being placed sideways on to me (and as a result being pretty much inaudible) and me usually being cramped in on the right hand side of stage, close enough to the drummer’s ride cymbal to be able to touch it from my stool means that what I hear is the wildest mess of levels. This leaves me often inferring where we are in the song rather than being able to actually hear.
If we were working professionally we’d put a bit more time and resources into sorting things out but being in a band can be quite like herding cats… This is an extreme example but there are some lessons to be learned for us when we are setting up monitor mixes in the studio.
The Level You Hear Affects How You Perform
Firstly, the level. At that gig I could hear myself too loudly. Although I knew it would and I tried not to let it, it affected my playing. On piano parts I didn’t dig in as hard as I would have had my level been lower and on Organ parts I found I stopped swells from my footpedal earlier than I might otherwise have.
If you are tracking someone in the studio, particularly a singer, you can exploit this effect by deliberately mixing a singer high in their mix if you want them to pull back from the mic or moderate their singing level but much more likely in my experience is to encourage them to sing louder by reducing their level in the headphones. If you are using a pop shield then you can use that to limit how close on the mic they sing so if they are low in the mix they are more likely to sing louder.
Tweaking The Mix Rather Than Having To Ask
Being able to encourage a change without having to ask won’t make a performer focus on that particular aspect of their performance in the same way as directly suggesting it would, potentially giving a more natural result. In the same way. If a singer’s pitch isn’t where it should be, rather than telling them that a take was getting pitchy, first consider how well they can hear themselves and if you think they need some help, consider using reverb rather than level to help them discern their pitch better. They need to be able to hear themselves properly but continuing to turn up a singer with pitch problems probably won’t help. Particularly as a headroom is finite and limiters for safety are common on headphone mixes.
Using EQ To Encourage A Change
So using level and reverb it’s possible for the engineer to direct a performer without actually asking them to make a change. Are there any other possible strategies? Well yes, using EQ. EQ is after all just a frequency specific level change. One good example is a bass player asking for more of themselves. If a bass player wants more of themselves, rather than boosting the bass guitar in that mix, a judicious boost of the bottom end in their mix might give them what they want more quickly than however many rounds of “bit more, bit less, split the difference..”. Though in my experience when a bass player wants more bass it’s usually higher up in the bass frequencies than you might expect. Dialling this in across the mix rather than the bass itself leaves the bass unaffected for everyone else and also brings up the bass energy across the whole mix rather than just the bass track.
Another potential candidate is electric guitars, where midrange tweaks can be used to either encourage or discourage more aggressive playing. If the upper midrange is tamed a little it can persuade a player to dig in more without the engineer having to say a word.
All of these are examples of how a monitor mix, which after all is fundamental to creating the performance, doesn’t, and probably shouldn’t be a static mix which you set and forget. Comfortable players make for better mixes but that doesn’t mean that the monitor mix can’t be used to influence the take.
As for my band, after Saturday’s wedding experience I might just have to look into running a little notebook mixer and a pair of IEM’s. Enough is enough!