In this era of DIY and information, the craft of engineering has become neglected and seen as unnecessary. Today, it’s easier than ever to have world class sounds at your fingertips. Now that anyone can get the gear, modern recording seems to be an easy feat, but the truth is, the gear cannot do anything by itself. It’s not as simple as plug this in here, throw that on there, and magically it sounds like a hit record. Just like in anything, practice makes perfect and as a veteran in this industry, I can tell you it takes years of practice, so let me help you get started by giving you some tips to avoid as a beginner.
Patience
When it comes to anything in life, patience is key. In engineering, giving yourself time to learn is key. Just because you have the latest gear, doesn’t make you a pro. Educate yourself by watching tutorials, practice capturing good sounds at the source, and focusing on one element at a time. Rest easy if you don’t have very much gear starting out. Use what you have and make sure you know your setup inside and out.
Getting a good start
When it comes to any project, whether it’s photography, sound, or any type of art, what you begin with makes all of the different. Sure, editing software can make a difference, but make no mistake in thinking that it is a magician. Getting a good, clean sound from the beginning makes your project easier to work with and you will find yourself meeting little to no bumps in the road. And as an added bonus, it leaves more room for you to get creative.
Fear of Mistakes
As a beginner it can be daunting to jump into using EQ or adding compressors. As humans, we have a fear of not getting it right, but in order to become a great engineer, you need to commit to using effects often in order to become familiar with them. Sure you’ll make some mistakes at first, but like I said earlier – practice makes perfect, and by playing with effects, you’ll become confident in your use of them when you need them.
Organization
Organization is good in any field, but more especially when you are working on a project that will be handed off to a mixing engineer later. It will make their life easier when they receive your session. Make sure that everything is labeled properly, so that the person receiving it will know what goes where. For a limited time we are offering a free sample of our mixing and mastering services. Learn MoreUpload Files Here
Mic Placement
Microphones are like ears – they listen to the instrument. Their placement makes a difference in how the instrument will sound to you and on record. It is vital to focus on becoming familiar with mic placement by moving the mics around and playing with them. More often than not, your problem is the mic placement.
Tuning
Before putting your microphones through the feat of listening to the sound of your instruments, make sure they are tuned and working harmoniously with one another. This means moving people around, swapping instruments, replacing drum heads, etc.
After you have assured that all the instruments sound good, then you can decide where to put the mics.
Phase
Phase is a relationship between two or more frequencies. I’ll say it again.
Phase is a relationship between two or more frequencies. It’s not Polarity. We will talk about polarity in a different article all together.
The most common phase problems people have are in recordings with multiple microphones recording the same source. The problem is that one microphone may be closer than the other and although the source may sound good, when the recording is captured you’ll have something that looks like this:
The red line = y1 + y2. It is the sum of the two waves at different point in their wave cyles (or phases).
I don’t want to complicate this too much, but phase has the ability to completely cancel out your frequencies (more often than not your LOW end frequencies).
Now that we’ve established what that is, let’s get to the point.
It is crucial to develop a technique for a good phase relationship – in order to do this you must familiarize yourself with the basics of phase. When you get your technique down, you’ll be able to get great sounds with multiple microphones.
Let’s talk about audio splits and stems and what we can do with them on Premiere Pro. Audio stems are a collection of audio sources mixed together. They are audio files but the significance of calling them stems is that they collectively make sense for the project. They are essential for transporting files and basically they make an engineers life easier. Audio splits are a separation of the final mix into smaller more discrete audio elements. These stems come in handy when you want to replace some elements like dialogue in a project without having to go back into the original audio project and mess around with it to get what you want. To make it easy, it is best if you have 6 mono tracks (3 stereo stem tracks) for left and right sound effects, dialogue and music. When it comes to 5.1 surround mix, sports or comedy shows you will end up with a lot more tracks and other variations. For example, in comedy shows the laugh track is isolated as a stem. So depending on the case, you may end up with with a few DME tracks or a single M&E track in stereo.
If you do work in entertainment programming, short films, commercials or corporate videos, then this should be common practice. If you do it while you are in the works of a specific project, then later down the line it WILL make your life easier. Although it is possible to go back to your files and do it later, it just saves time (time = money, people!).
So now it’s time to set up your new Premiere Pro sequence. For generating a multichannel master file with isolated DME stems in FCP X, we use the Roles function. In order to do this you need to ensure that the proper Roles is assigned from the start of your project. If you do this for the sound effects, music and dialogue Roles, then the stems will self-sort when you export them. It all comes down to how you route a Role to the channel that it corresponds to.
When we look at audio editing and mixing, Premiere Pro CC’s is also a good tool to use and the process is pretty easy. Just like I mentioned earlier though, you have to set up the proper sequence designed for the type of audio work you are working with. Correspondence is MAJOR KEY (thanks Dj Khaled). And just like I mentioned before, doing it right from the beginning will save you a headache and a trip to the quick mart to pick up some eye drops and a coffee.
Okay, so the first thing you want to do is create a custom preset. Presets are designed with a certain number of tracks routed to a stereo master output and thus you will have a 2-channel file when you export. You’re gonna want to change the track configuration to multi-channel and then set your number of output channels. Next, you’re gonna want to add the number of tracks you need and assign the regular tracks as “standard” or “stereo submix” for the submix tracks. The more complex the project, the more regular tracks it contains – and of course this all depends on the type of work you are doing with dialogue overlapping, sound effects or music on the timeline. Some sound engineers like to have what they call “zones” for the different types of audio. For this you would just have a certain amount of tracks for the dialogue, another amount for the music, and another for the sound effects – depending on the length of your timeline. To make for easy recognition and organization, it’s smart to rename your submixes according to what they contain. For example DLG for dialogue, or SE for sound effects. One cool feature about Premiere Pro is the ability to mix audio in several different places. You can do it in the audio track mixer or the clip mixer. To work with the audio track mixer, go to it and assign the routing and channel output (this can also be assigned in the sequence preset panel). For each of the regular tracks, it would be a good idea to set the pulldown for routing to the corresponding submix track, this way all of the submix tracks are routed to the Master Output.
Lastly, you’re going to want to assign the proper channel routing. This is so the sequence preset you created will contain the full mix in the first and second master channels. To do this you need to export a 2-channel file as either a review copy or a master file (only the first 2 output channels are used by default, which means these will always get the mix without you having to do anything). Next you’re going to want to enable stereo monitoring for the stereo stems. Since channels 1 and 2 are the default, you’re going to need to make some changes in order for this to happen. To enable this, you are going to need to assign the channel output in the following format: Dialogue (Submix 1) to 1-2 and 3-4, Sound Effects (Submix 2) to 1-2 and 5-6, and Music (submix 3) to 1-2 and 7-8. The reasoning behind this is that everything is going to go to both the full mix and the the isolated stereo channel for each of the audio components.
Okay, so now that the hard part is over, it’s time to edit the custom timeline. For this you simply edit any of the dialogue clips to track one, sound effects to track 2, and music to track 3. If you are working on a more complex project, then what you would work with are the “zones” I referred to earlier. For example, if 1-8 are routed to the dialogue submix track, then all you would do is edit the dialogue clips to tracks 1-8. And the same goes for the others.
Now it’s time for export. This needs to be done correctly or else all of your hard work goes to waste. To do this there are a few good choices: a QuickTime ProRes files or the MXF OP1a choices. In the export settings panel there is an audio tab, you’re gonna want to change the pulldown channel selection from stereo to 8 channels. With this you’re gonna have your timeline output channels exported as a separate mono track in the file. Now you have everything in one single, neat file, you have the final image and mix in one neat file as well as your isolated stems that can make easy changes later on. If you are a little paranoid like I am and you want to future-proof your project, you’re gonna want to save and export some extra versions with and without titles.
Let’s suppose the day for you to reuse the file has arrived. You’re going to want to import this file back into Premiere Pro. Since the channel structure is going to be read as 8 mono channels, you’re going to need to modify the file simply by using the Modify-Audio Channels contextual menu and right-click the clip. Simply change the clip channel format from Mono to Stereo. This is going to change the 8 mono channels into 4 left stereo channels and 4 right stereo channels.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. If this helped, thank me later. Looking forward to next time, Chris.
If you are sending your song to us online for mixing and mastering, it’s very important to make sure your files are sent correctly. Thankfully, Ableton makes it quick and easy for you to export your stems!
A stem is a single element of the song exported as a single file. Multiple tracks that you’re rendering at one time can be put together to recreate the song. Ableton has a very simple and straight forward way of doing this, so let’s go through it now!
Step 1 – Label Your Tracks
Before exporting anything, you need to make sure everything is labeled. Whenever you send your files to someone else, it’s important to make sure the person it’s going to knows what every file contains. Ableton exports multiple audio tracks, so if you have a vocal and a snare on one single track, it will make things a little bit crazy. It also labels the audio tracks based on what the track names are, andnot the clip names. Select each track name and label them to represent what that tracks are doing.
Step 2 – Arrangement Is Everything!
Ableton’s session view allows you to play various Scenes and Clips in any particular order. You can render audio from the Session view just specify the amount of time with your current selection that you would like to have rendered.
In the Arrangement View, you can either drag-select the area that you would like to export…
Or, you can use the loop selection range to choose what area of the song you’d like to export…
In this mode, just make sure that you have something in the arrangement!
Step 3 – Export
Once you’re ready to export your stems to audio and you’ve highlighted your arrangement (or set up your loop range), press: Command-Shift-R
This box will appear:
Ensure the bottom section of the box indicates the right time range.
Indicate if you want to render in stereo, or mono. For stems, or separated tracks, choose “mono”. If you have stereo loops in your arrangement, you will need to go back and render those in “stereo” separately.
Finally, select the all the tracks you want to export. If yo want all the tracks, select the “All Tracks” option.
Important: When Ableton Live asks you where you want to save the ‘audio file’, create a new folder and name it by the name of the song. Export all of those files in the same folder.
Once complete, follow this link to our upload form and follow the instructions.
