I wanna talk about sound stage.
A sound engineer or sound designer does a job we call it "mixing". What is mixing? What is its importance in music industry?
Basically, mixing is a process to achieve two goals: 1. balancing or making multiple instruments coexist each other (clarity is the up most important), 2. Presenting the song in a creative way (climax & resolve).
When the artist has finished with the recordings of multiple tracks by different instruments, he'll send them to the mixing studio, and the engineer will try to fix in every of them, deciding when and where to add or cut or etc...
Few parameters that can be played around with:
1. The pan (a.k.a left or right). It's pretty obvious that modern pop songs have this kind of characteristic. This is way too different from the olden days' mono speaker, whereby the sound came from only one speaker/source. It gives the horizontal parameter so that we can imagine the sound stage in 2D (instead than 1D of mono!) while enjoying the music. Separating out instruments makes them sound more independent, not mixed muddily.
2. The reverberation. Reverberation produces a psycho acoustic effect-depth of stage. When you hear a sound from a far distance and you compare it with the guy talking right in front of you, what's the different? The far one has a more reverberant sound compare to the one talking right in front of you. It's the same concept when you want to shift an instrument front up or back deep into the stage! Again, wider and deeper stage creates an image of 3D, not a bore "paper". Just be careful not to make it too muddy till it becomes too "viscous" and eat up all the space, you don't want your stage to become a cave, clarity! Psychoacoustic wise, reverberation changes a person's feel on vertical dimension of the source-in rise when reverb is added.
Another interesting thing to consider: When one pan the piano to left speaker, and guitar to right speaker, does it means stereo stage setting? No, it's not. It's dual mono. To make the piano a stereo stage instrument, one must add the piano's reverberant signal to the right speaker. Both speakers must be considered as a stage source from the same place . Meaning, the left speaker will act exactly like a piano (plays notes, pure notes) while the right speaker will act as the wall on the stage bouncing off piano notes (while room acoustics are all considered).
That's all for today! It's really fun!
A sound engineer or sound designer does a job we call it "mixing". What is mixing? What is its importance in music industry?
Basically, mixing is a process to achieve two goals: 1. balancing or making multiple instruments coexist each other (clarity is the up most important), 2. Presenting the song in a creative way (climax & resolve).
When the artist has finished with the recordings of multiple tracks by different instruments, he'll send them to the mixing studio, and the engineer will try to fix in every of them, deciding when and where to add or cut or etc...
Few parameters that can be played around with:
1. The pan (a.k.a left or right). It's pretty obvious that modern pop songs have this kind of characteristic. This is way too different from the olden days' mono speaker, whereby the sound came from only one speaker/source. It gives the horizontal parameter so that we can imagine the sound stage in 2D (instead than 1D of mono!) while enjoying the music. Separating out instruments makes them sound more independent, not mixed muddily.
2. The reverberation. Reverberation produces a psycho acoustic effect-depth of stage. When you hear a sound from a far distance and you compare it with the guy talking right in front of you, what's the different? The far one has a more reverberant sound compare to the one talking right in front of you. It's the same concept when you want to shift an instrument front up or back deep into the stage! Again, wider and deeper stage creates an image of 3D, not a bore "paper". Just be careful not to make it too muddy till it becomes too "viscous" and eat up all the space, you don't want your stage to become a cave, clarity! Psychoacoustic wise, reverberation changes a person's feel on vertical dimension of the source-in rise when reverb is added.
Another interesting thing to consider: When one pan the piano to left speaker, and guitar to right speaker, does it means stereo stage setting? No, it's not. It's dual mono. To make the piano a stereo stage instrument, one must add the piano's reverberant signal to the right speaker. Both speakers must be considered as a stage source from the same place . Meaning, the left speaker will act exactly like a piano (plays notes, pure notes) while the right speaker will act as the wall on the stage bouncing off piano notes (while room acoustics are all considered).
That's all for today! It's really fun!
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