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Hunter Rick
Today I had my first session with my mentor Zach Phillips of Freqlab.
We started off in the live room and discussed frequencies, Hz, basic Miking Techniques, and the different types of waveforms that exist.
Most of this was knowledge I held prior to the lesson and so we only spent a brief amount of time reviewing it before moving on.
When we got to the topic of mastering and how different companies have different requirements for mastering to be put on their apps or sites, I brought up the loudness wars. We went a little more in depth about that and how remasters on CD's from vinyls often were unnecessarily altered more than they needed to be simply because they thought it was sound "cleaner and fresher". They often brightened them and ruined the dynamic range of the transients from things like snares and kicks, by over compressing them with hard limiters to add volume. This resulted in a period of time where everyone felt Vinyls sounded better than CDs.
Afterwards we moved to the monitoring room where he explained and showed me multiple pieces of equipment.
He explained how the Neves Control Console and Pro Tools software interact and their various intricacies. The soundboard is standardized for the most part, so once you learn how to use one, you can mix on any Neves Console of the same type right away. He also explained how bussing, and sub-groups worked, to utilize better and more efficient ways of controlling your channels.
He also showed me an older analog tape 8-track tape recorder the studio had, and how the tape could be inserted and also spliced.
Finally, we went over how Zach goes about mixing his drums. He says that he doesn't pan his drums at all and feels that a widened sound for drums has lost its novelty and is a thing of the past. This surprised me, because as of now I had always panned my drums (excluding the kick and snare) subtlety to the left and right to create space in the mix and have them come through clearer. I will try and adapt a method of relying on compression, side chaining, and EQ more often, to keep them coming through the mix instead.
This ended our session for today.
