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Dan Friedman

Recording Magazine’s Room Acoustics Series Part 7

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Recording Magazine sends out a newsletter to its subscribers every few weeks. The newsletter is (coincidentally) titled “Sound Advice” and this month it features the seventh in a series about room acoustics. Room acoustics is one of the biggest concerns for Recording Magazine readers. I know that this is also a big issue for those of you in the voiceover world. I asked permission to reprint this newsletter (and will ask to reprint the others in the series as well) so that those of you with home studios can also benefit from the information. I want to personally thank Brent Heintz, VP/Associate Publisher for granting permission, allowing me to share this great information with you.

Please visit Recording Magazine‘s website and Facebook Page.

Catch up or skip ahead: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 8.

Here is the seventh newsletter in the series on Room Acoustics:

Welcome to Sound Advice on Acoustics! Last time, we talked about how the timing and placement of sound waves reflected off surfaces in a room can play with our perception of how loud they are, what their tonal quality is, and where they’re coming from. Now that we have a grasp of the problem, it’s time to get it under control so our control room can provide an honest representation of what is coming from our loudspeakers.

One obvious and successful approach is to deaden reflective surfaces by placing absorptive material on them, eliminating problematic reflections. Since we’re concerned with mid and high frequencies here, with relatively short wavelengths, the familiar foam sheets and fiberglass-filled acoustic panels that we often see in studios are readily available and very effective. These can be hung or affixed to walls and ceiling to damp reflective surfaces. As noted earlier, a completely absorptive room would sound unnatural and be unsuitable for any musical application, so the solution is to apply only as much damping as needed to eliminate the most problematic reflections, while allowing enough reflections to remain to give the room an appropriate sense of “liveness.”

Again, the most problematic reflections are the earliest and strongest, coming from reflective surfaces closest to the source. In a control room, if the source is the speakers, this would be the walls and ceiling in the front and front-sides of the room. Reflections from the rear, having traveled a greater distance, would be weaker and, since they arrive much later than the direct sound, will not cause excessive coloration. As a result, they could be allowed to contribute to the necessary ambience in the room. If these rear reflections were further diffused for a more even distribution throughout the room, as described above, that would achieve the best balance while preserving the neutrality at the primary monitoring position (the “sweet spot”).

This approach is often described as LEDE™ (live-end/dead-end), a term and concept introduced by industry veteran Chip Davis (the trademark is held by Synergetic Audio Concepts, Inc.—www.synaudcon.com). Early applications of this technique completely deadened the front of the room (front wall, side walls, ceiling, except of course the control room window), as far back as the mix position. The back of the room was left live and diffused.

Damping the earliest reflections this way increases the initial time-delay gap, the time between the direct sound and the first of the early reflections which determine the acoustic character of the room. Increasing this gap in the control room allows for early reflections in recordings to be heard more clearly, without the control room imposing its own acoustic signature on everything played in it.

The approach works well, providing a lot of clarity at the monitoring position, but can sometimes result in good but slightly dry-sounding spaces. Some modern approaches tend to use a bit less absorption in the front of the room, damping some reflections and redirecting others away from the sweet spot toward the back of the room, where they can be diffused. If done well, this can provide a somewhat more “live” environment while still maintaining the essential clarity.

In a low-budget situation you can target the most problematic early reflections and damp them down even without benefit of the computer programs the pros use for this. You’ll improve clarity without excessive cost or analysis. This can be done by using the “mirror trick” we mentioned last time; here’s how it works.

One person sits in the mix position, while another takes a mirror and moves it around a side wall until the person sitting in the sweet spot can see the speaker on that side of the room reflected in the mirror. This shows the path of a sound originating at the speaker, and reflecting from that spot directly to the listening position, based on the “angle of incidence” rule we learned last time. Remember, light reflects just as sound does, so if you can see the speaker in the mirror on the wall, sound from the speaker will bounce off that spot on the wall and hit your ears!

Applying appropriate damping to that spot on the wall will eliminate (or at least reduce) an early, strong, and most likely problematic reflection. You do the same for such reflective locations at both side walls, ceiling, and even the floor. This isolates the most direct and strongest reflections, and damping them can make a noticeable improvement in clarity at the monitoring position, without overly deadening the room.

Flutter echo is another related problem that arises from reflected sound, especially from lateral reflections: A sound wave hits a parallel wall straight on, and (again, in accordance with the “angle of incidence” rule) reflects straight off and over to the other wall, setting up a repetitive back and forth reflection pattern that can result in an audible metallic “ringing.” As with room modes, splaying the walls to avoid parallelism can prevent this, but so will effective damping, as per above, and damping is certainly easier to implement than wall splaying.

Next time, we’ll consider what’s going on at the back of the room, and consider the problem of reflections off your mixing console. We’ll also discuss what using closely-aimed monitors buys you (and doesn’t). See you then!

Recording Magazine’s Room Acoustics Series Part 6

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Recording Magazine sends out a newsletter to its subscribers every few weeks. The newsletter is (coincidentally) titled “Sound Advice” and this month it features the sixth in a series about room acoustics. Room acoustics is one of the biggest concerns for Recording Magazine readers. I know that this is also a big issue for those of you in the voiceover world. I asked permission to reprint this newsletter (and will ask to reprint the others in the series as well) so that those of you with home studios can also benefit from the information. I want to personally thank Brent Heintz, VP/Associate Publisher for granting permission, allowing me to share this great information with you.

Please visit Recording Magazine‘s website and Facebook Page.

Catch up or skip ahead: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7, Part 8.

Here is the sixth newsletter in the series on Room Acoustics:

Welcome back to Sound Advice on Acoustics! For the last few installments, we’ve been talking about the basics of room acoustics: how sound moves, room dimensions, and systems for analyzing and dealing with low-frequency problems. As we start to consider the mids and higher frequencies, with the transmission, reflection, and absorption of sound as it travels around our room, we have to have an understanding of how our own hearing systems interpret this barrage of direct and reflected sound. Here we go!

When a direct sound reaches our ears followed by a reflection, how we perceive these two sounds is determined by the arrival time of the reflection. If it arrives less than about 50 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) after the original sound does, we perceive only the original direct sound, but the interference effects contributed by the delayed out-of-phase reflection will color the timbre of that sound.

Our auditory system’s perceptual fusing of the direct and reflected sounds, under the conditions described above, is called the precedence effect (or Haas effect)—the ear integrates all reflections within ~50 milliseconds of the first arrival (direct sound). But if a reflection arrives more than ~50 milliseconds later than the direct sound, it is not perceptually fused with the direct sound and is instead heard as a discrete echo.

The actual threshold of the shift in perception from integration to echoes is gradual between about 25–50 milliseconds, and varies depending on the nature of the original sound. For example, for short percussive sounds with sharp attack transients, the perceptual fusing of direct and reflected sounds may break down at only 20 milliseconds of delay, or even less. (A musician calls this “flamming.”)

The delay, or gap, between the direct sound and the first reflection, as well as the spacing of the other (integrated) early reflections determines the acoustic character (our sense of the size and shape) of the room. If there are enough reflective areas, the later reflections, instead of being heard individually as echoes, build up in density and form reverberation, which continues after the direct sound stops, dying away gradually. Reverberation time (RT60) refers to the time it takes for this reverberant tail to decay by 60 dB. In control rooms this property is usually kept to a minimum by design.

Another aspect of our hearing in regards to direct and reflected sound is described by the “Law of the First Wavefront.” This says that when we hear a direct sound followed by early reflections, our auditory system not only integrates them, but also determines the localization of this combined sound from the direction of the first arriving sound.

So if a sound wave originates from a loudspeaker in front of us and slightly to the left, followed a few milliseconds later by a reflection from the right, we identify everything as coming from the loudspeaker. However, if the reflected sound is about 10 dB or so louder than the direct sound, the localization towards the direction of the first arrival breaks down, the perceived image shifts, and the direct/reflected sound then appears to be spread out between the actual sources.

Another directional aspect of our auditory perception is that reflections from the same direction as the (direct) source can be 5–10 dB louder before being detected than reflections originating from other directions. This is so because the direct sound masks the reflections coming from the same direction. So strong reflections from the sides of the room (lateral reflections) can be more problematic than those from the front.

The presence of early reflections, echoes, and reverberation in a room is normal and adds fullness and a sense of spaciousness to music, but in a control room, too much of this can be a problem. Recordings being monitored already contain recorded ambience, or else they may have artificial ambience added to them, but either way we need to hear the reflections in the recordings more than the ambience of the control room itself. And of course, reflection-based effects like image shifts and colorations of the direct sound also obscure aspects of the recorded sound like panning and tonal balance, so reflected sound must be tightly controlled to insure a good monitoring environment.

If we’re going to try to control or eliminate certain reflections in a room, we should trace their pathways as they travel through the room. When a sound wave is reflected off a room surface, there is a well-known rule which describes the propagation of that reflected wave: “The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.” This means that for whatever angle a sound wave strikes a reflective surface, it will bounce off that surface at an equal but opposite angle (see Figure 7). You can see this for yourself by bouncing a flashlight beam off a mirror—and this is actually the basis for a handy means of dealing with these reflections that we’ll discuss next time (which we call the “mirror trick”).

The most problematic reflections are the earliest and therefore the strongest. By applying the above rule, reflection pathways can be predicted, and strong reflections can usually be traced from the source (i.e. loudspeaker) to the positions on nearby reflective surfaces where these worst offenders originate. Next time we’ll begin to discuss how to deal with these problem reflections, and we’ll teach you the mirror trick as well. See you then!

In Memory – Bill Thomas

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From a whisper to a scream, Bill Thomas could do it all. There are few voices that are as big and booming and yet still as versatile as was the voice of Bill Thomas. There are even fewer people left in this industry who have the knowledge, perspective and technical skill that Bill possessed.

While Bill was often cantankerous and opinionated outside of the booth, he was also supportive and caring of those around him. He could drive people crazy and even make a person angry when he expressed his personal views and thoughts about the world. However, he never said a bad word about anyone personally. In fact, whether you agreed with him or not, he would still treat you with genuine respect, care and concern.

He was always at his best when he was in front of the microphone. I will remember him most fondly for being incredibly diverse, remarkably charming and exceptionally talented. His comedic timing, microphone technique and copy interpretation were all pure perfection. He was generous with compliments to the talent around him, including the writers, directors and engineers. He had a great ear and never complained about doing more takes if needed. He generously offered to work “until the point of diminishing returns” as we would frequently say. It was as though he never wanted to leave the mic.

I will miss working with you Bill.

I will end with the same words with which you often ended your recording sessions, “It was an honor and a pleasure.”

Click below to hear the amazing Bill Thomas:

In Memorium Bill Thomas

Executing a Vision in Voiceover

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Last Friday I found out that I won Edge Studios Weekly Script Recording Contest. How awesome is that? While I’m really excited about winning and I certainly had no expectation that I would, I’m also not surprised that my entry was successful. I had a clear “vision” of what my production was going to sound like when it was finished… before I even began to work on it. I believe that having that vision is what led to the success of my contest entry. That vision and the steps I took to turn it into a reality, is what this blog is all about.

Creative people often have a very good idea of what something will look or sound like before they even get started. That “vision” (for lack of a better word when it pertains to audio) is what guides you as you begin to put the elements together and execute your plan. But first, just as an artist needs a canvas, the director’s notes provide the framework and foundation for everything that follows.

Here are the notes from the Edge Studio website:

Director’s Notes:
“We’re looking for a talent who can provide fully produced spots with a new sound for some of our sport promos. The delivery should be energetic, hip, and confident — not gimmicky or conventional. We will want fully produced mp3s with music and sound effects (when appropriate). This audition should be 5 seconds and should be fully produced. Please slate your full name and “CBS Sports Telecast 1 audition”. Thank you.”

Being able to work within the guidelines provided is absolutely essential to success in this case. Just as a painter is (usually) limited to the space provided by canvas, TV and radio are limited by time. In this instance, the most strict guideline given was that the audition must be 5 seconds. There are some rules that can be broken… a time limitation on a broadcast production is not one of them.

A key element to not only having vision, but also knowing you can turn it in to reality, is having the right tools available to execute it. Having good quality tools allows a carpenter to build a house, a deck or install hardwood floors faster and easier then if they simply had a hammer and a saw. Good tools also help to ensure better results. The tools required for this audio production are: my voice, studio equipped with good quality gear, music, sound effects and powerful computer with multitrack DAW.

For voiceover and voiceover production, your vision for the final product must originate from the script. The script determines the voice delivery as well as the production elements that will be used to maximize the effectiveness of the full production.

Here is the script from Edge Studio’s website:

“This CBS Sports telecast is brought to you by Wells Fargo…. together we’ll go far.”

This script, as short as it is, provides a great deal of information. Of course “CBS sports” and “Wells Fargo” are important because they are the client’s names, but they’re also key to creating a vision for the overall production. Since this is a fast “sports” promo, strong and powerful music would seem appropriate. I chose two cuts that I believed would be a good fit. Because Wells Fargo is known for their horse and carriage theme, galloping horses make a great sound effect and help draw attention to the sponsoring client. As you will later read, Edge suggests using crowd noise or a sports team sound effect. While this would also be appropriate (and I had thought about it), my vision included the horses and I believed crowd noise could clutter the final mix. Using the horses also gave me the opportunity to illustrate the final line in the spot, “together we’ll go far” by panning the horses, with them entering the soundscape on the left and leaving it on the right.

My last step before getting into the booth to do the voiceover was to import a couple of “swish” sound effects and a “low drone” into my DAW. I would add these to give the spot more movement and create additional drama. They are only slightly audible in the final mix and are there to provide a sensation more than a noticeable sound.

After getting into the booth and recording the line ten times, I chose my second take. However, all of the takes were longer than five seconds, so time compression was an absolute must. Once that was done and I verified that the voiceover was still sounding good, it was time to mix.

First, I laid my voice track over the two music cuts I had chosen and decided which cut was working best. I then edited the music track to fit the 5 second time frame. Next I added the galloping horse sound effect, put it in position, edited that to fit the space I wanted to fill and panned it from left to right. Next, I added the low drone and swish sound effects. I mixed in the voice track and used dynamic compression, EQ and a little reverb to give the voice some additional separation and brilliance. Lastly, I mixed all the tracks down through a master limiter and exported it to a stereo MP3 file. Throughout this process I was adjusting levels and carefully listening to every element and every tweak. In the end, I had produced a spot that matched my “vision” almost exactly.

Here were the comments on my entry from Edge Studios:

Great job! His slate is clear and delivered in the same style as his audition. His mix is very solid. And he’s one of the very few to come in at the requested 5 seconds. Adding sound effects of a crowd cheering and/or a sports team playing would have made this audition even better (although doing so was not necessary). Nice work danfriedman!

Clear visions of the final production don’t always come easily, but it is certainly helpful when they do. In voiceover production, vision will usually begin with the script and the delivery, but truly come into focus as all of the elements are brought together. But what is even more important than your vision as the voice talent or the production engineer, is the clients vision for the final production. If your vision for the voiceover or the production doesn’t match that of your clients, it is critical that you have the ability to change your point of view. After all, beauty is in the eye… ahem… ear… of the beholder.

CBS Sports1 Audition

What Else Do You Want From Your Voiceover Talent?

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This blog post is for everyone who uses voiceover talent in their productions. A voice talent’s job is to communicate the message of your script. But what else should you expect from the talent you choose? How do you prefer that the talent go about assisting you with achieving your goals? Other than being great communicators, what can the talent bring to your production that adds value and makes your recording session great?

What is most important to you:

Delivery?

Versatility?

Efficiency?

Tonal Quality?

Assistance?

Q: Do you like to allow the voice talent to give their interpretation of a script, or do you prefer to direct them first?

Professional voice talent are trained to interpret a script and use the words as a road map. The words usually determine the tone and delivery. Unless… they don’t. You can allow the voiceover talent to follow the map, or ask the talent to explore other paths.

Q: Do you prefer to hear several different deliveries?

Going into a recording session, you may not have a good idea of what the exact tone of your script should be. It could be very effective delivered in several ways. Asking your voice talent to offer a variety of options may allow you to discover a bit of magic you hadn’t thought of or help you make a final decision as to what delivery works best.

Q: Do you prefer the talent you are working with to deliver the script completely or do you prefer to massage each line and piece together the “perfect” read?

Reading a script straight through, or at least large sections in a single pass, allows the voice talent to maintain tone and pace. This will usually result in a more consistent and cohesive read. When necessary, the talent can pick up lines afterward to get the nuance you may be listening for if they didn’t get it on the first pass. With the assistance of your session’s audio engineer, you can have the best lines edited together quickly to see how they work together as a whole.

Q: Do you choose a talent based on voice quality alone?

Every voice talent has different strengths. Some are best suited for announcer reads, while others shine in more conversational or character roles. If you cast based on voice quality alone you may have mixed results when you get into the studio. This is where casting directors, who know the abilities of the voice talent, can help you choose the best voice for the job.

Q: Do you find it helpful if a voice talent has the ability to actively assist you with your script, whether it be grammatically or with overall tone and flow?

Professional voice talent learn to become good copy editors. Whether the problem is length of copy, grammar, or a scripts tone and flow, the voice talent you hire may have suggestions that can improve the final product. If your voice over script isn’t sounding right and you can’t put your finger on it, ask the talent for help.

You may find it helpful to ask yourself these questions as you begin each project. There is no doubt that your level of experience with voiceover production may determine some, or all of the answers. Furthermore, everyone chooses a voice based on different needs and what is appropriate for each project. But the answers to these questions could help you decide which voice talent is best for your current or future projects.

There are many voices available and often voice quality is not the number one factor in your choice. If you have narrowed your choices down to two talent and you know that no matter who you choose, the delivery would be great; would the answers to these other questions make a difference in who gets the job? Only you can decide. So, what else do you want from your voiceover talent?

Voiceover Processors – Hardware vs Software Revisited

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There is a lot of talk about mic modelers in social media today. A while back, I was asked the question in regards to voiceovers, which processors (i.e.- compressors, EQ, etc.) are better: hardware or software? Well my answer to that question, also applies to mic modelers. The tools available in both formats have advantages and disadvantages. While nothing can truly substitute for the real thing, this doesn’t mean that a simulation can’t be useful, effective or even very good. Whether we are talking about microphones or other audio processors, there are hardware models that sound great and perform exceptionally well, and then there are some that do not. The same is true for software versions.

Consistency is critical in voiceover work, so a clean unprocessed signal during recording is usually ideal. As a voice talent you generally will not, or should not, be using processors when recording, and if you are it should be very minimal and the same every time. Therefore, you really don’t need a great deal of choices.

If you are a voice over talent working from your home studio, chances are that software versions will be your best or maybe your only option. Besides not really needing many choices, it just doesn’t make financial sense for someone who only does voiceover work to own a vast array of microphones, hardware or rack gear. When considering processors, hardware boxes will take up valuable space in what are often small spaces to begin with. Another downside is that they give off a great deal of heat (especially tube gear) making tight spaces more uncomfortable.

Does hardware sound better than software? Not necessarily. As an engineer, I would love to have full racks of hardware options at my disposal. Each helps to create different sounds, characteristics and textures within a mix. But would having racks of gear stop me from using software versions? Not likely.

Software versions of processors perform the same functions as their hardware counterparts, and like their hardware counterparts, they also have different sounds, characteristics and textures of their own. These characteristics vary from processor to processor in software versions just as they do in different brands and types of hardware. Software versions meant to emulate specific models of rack gear can come very close to capturing that hardware sound. But they will still have their own sound and character that make them different, not necessarily better or worse, than the hardware they emulate.

If it is great sound as well as a variety of sounds you are going for, then having both hardware and software is the way to go. However, if your space and budget are limited, then having a variety of software versions will probably be just fine for your needs. The bottom line is this, whether your processing options come from hardware or software, the tools are only as good and as effective as the person using them. Get the best sounding tools you can afford, learn how to use them and most importantly… use your ears.

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828.551.0891

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