Middleman wrote on Thu, 17 February 2005 23:44 |
Terry...I was listening to Zep 3 on the radio and noticed how well the kick and drums come through on small speakers. Songs from the same era and even most today don't pop up as nicely. In some cases a lot of the same era music reveals the vocal and maybe guitars as well as snare but the kick on the Zep 3 album just punches right in perfectly on small speakers.
What monitors did you use while mixing if I may ask? Just wondered if you did a lot of comparison mixes on different sized speakers or if something like the Westlakes or other large systems offered up good translation in those days.
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At that time, I was using some JBL monitors, I think the model was 4320. These were JBL's upgrade on their D50 (the speaker designed by Bill Thomas, under supervision of Harvey Gerst [sound familiar?]), which was the competition for Altec's 604/605 series. (The 604 was an industry standard, but the 605, when introduced as an "upgrade" was not accepted, as it was really just a cheaper-to build-speaker, which didn't sound as good...so JBL got a foothold at that time, especially with Capitol Studios).
I would on occasion listen through a small, TV-like speaker in mono to hear translation, but I don't remember if I did that on this session. I've grown weary of that exercise however, and really have almost always used just use one set of speakers which I trust. I do not like to mix loudly, however, as (because of the effects of Fletcher-Munson curve, amongst other reasons) I don't think you get a true picture of tonal balance. This often disappoints the client, but they are usually grateful later. Of course, at the end, it's always fun to turn it up a bit, especially with rock music.
Nathan Eldred wrote on Fri, 18 February 2005 01:24 |
I think Zep III was the most influencial album to my engineering 'style'. LOVE the verbs...plates, chambers, rooms, combination?
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I only had EMT plates and a spring available to me during mix, but we also did use tape delay, tape "pre-delay" (as outlined in another post), tape flanging, and other such effects. However, many spatial effects in those days were committed to tape during tracking, so there were already some reverbs printed to tape. Some of these would have come from Olympic...I don't remember what they had. There was also, as you mention, some 'room' on certain things, resultant from mic technique.
Considering the paucity of effect, this era sometimes required a bit of audio legerdemain.
Thanks for the questions!
Terry