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SAE Magazine 12-2

T oo many songs enter production before they are complete because in reality music is an assortment of ideas and not a coherent composition. With the ease and accessibility of the DAW workflow, the music industry is inundated with material (songs) that are a series of loops and grooves that do not have carefully crafted melo- dies and meticulously planned arrangements. The result is a “good idea” that does not have lon- gevity because after 20 bars of music the song has nothing left to say. While we’re on the subject, the DAW with virtual instruments and samples has spawned a generation where everyone, including their families and pets, is a producer. In reality, most folk who are referring to themselves as pro- ducers are in fact a composer with a computer and the appropriate software? There is also a substan- tial difference between creating sick beatz and a composition. More beatz are not needed folks, but carefully crafted compositions that have something to say will never go out of style. Miles Davis used to tell his musicians with regard to taking solos when performing live “if you don’t have anything to say, shut up”. As with everything, our quality control and being informed are minimum require- ments for us to be competitive, because the artists, producers and engineers whose productions we as- pire to compete with, have these qualities locked down. So, what has any of this got to do with the 70% phi- losophy? The short answer is, everything! Many audio engineers and production teams spend rela- tively little time with the composition and record- ing of the material and rely, in certain instances almost completely, on the mixing to achieve bal- ance, coherence and musicality. When you press record, you have already determined about 70% of what the record will sound like, regardless of what automation and clever trickery you have planned for the mixing. The recording engineer’s responsi- bility is not simply to capture a signal and watch the levels; it is to ensure that a performance is cap- tured that is already balanced! This principle ap- plies to our workflow whether we are using MIDI or microphones, or both. The principle of the 70% philosophy is to achieve a balance of tones, levels and musicality before we press record. With this approach, more than ¾ of the production is completed during the recording phase, which makes mixing and mastering a cinch in time and effort and bypasses the need for dam- age control to produce a stellar result. Another Holy Grail for achieving balance during recording in the digital domain is to stop pinning the recording levels! In the days of analogue tape and noisier electronics, it was vital that engineers set the recording levels to tape as close to maxi- mum without clipping, to ensure the best possible signal-to-noise character of the recording. Most engineers in the digital domain still use this ap- proach and it is not necessary because of the in- credible signal-to-noise integrity of modern digital audio electronics (negligible noise with spectacu- lar transparency). Even entry-level digital audio gear can handle resolutions of 24 bit/96kHz easily so there is no excuse for us not to be using this in our productions – the benchmark recordings are. Yes we need to deliver a 16/44.1 final product but more on than that in a future article. Right now, we’re concentrating on the 70% philosophy! When your DAW session is prepped, routed and ready to go, let the music’s dynamics determine the recording levels, it is that simple! The bench- mark that we should be striving for is to present the mix engineer with recordings where they can bring all the faders up to unity gain on their con- sole (virtual or hardware) and already have a won- derfully balanced mix. This is only be possible if we use our 70% philosophy and it isn’t rocket sci- ence to achieve if we allow the recording levels to mirror reality – i.e. optimising your gain structure to receive the signal and then let the music dictate the levels-to-tape itself. It sounds simple, because it is! Mix engineers often need to ride faders and use complexautomationbecausetherecordingengineer (often the same person) has been level- watching and ignoring what the music is actually delivering. A soft sound or passage of music will have a low/ softer recording level and vice versa – leave it that way! Let the recording levels mirror the dynamics of the performance and don’t kill yourself trying to get hot levels - it is counter-productive. Many engi- neers believe they cannot achieve a LOUD produc- tion if they don’t have high recording levels? ➤ 89 Production & Know How // The 70% Philosophy Index

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