Sound System Tuning By Ear

this is Devin sheets with alpha sound and I'd like to talk about system tuning I'm gonna start with the Salem Art Fair and tell you my story we bought the Nexo gos a liner a system around 2004 I would have been a sophomore in high school so this was one of the first systems I learned to mix on and I've been using it for about 15 years now I know we've replaced all the individual boxes multiple times but it still feels like the same system especially on events like this we're even setting this line array up the same way on the same stage like forever so this is really a unique opportunity to track my growth as an engineer especially when it comes to system tuning because we've been using the Yamaha digital consoles forever as well and I've kept a record of my settings after annual events like this and every now and then I'll make comparisons to previous years so when it comes to system tuning for me there's two major factors that yield four possible outcomes you have vision or forethought on the part of the engineer and then you also have the technical know-how the first combination is an engineer with no vision and no skills when they walk up to the console they have no idea what they're going for and they really don't understand things like EQ and phase they'll turn up a fader and take a listen and more or less just either accept the sound at face value or make a few small tweaks for the heck of it when they turn a system who knows what you'll get it'll mostly be random the second combination is an engineer who has a vision for what they want but isn't very skilled this could also apply to musicians or producers they know how it should sound but they don't really know how to get there the few things they have some control over and might be able to do will be consistently good but overall pretty limited in scope the third combination is no vision the lots of skills these people can tweak for days they know the gear like the back of their hand and they keep a stack of user manuals for reading material in their bathroom but you ask them to do something ten times in a row it'll probably be widely inconsistent because they're aimless the last combination is of course a strong vision and a strong skill set producing widespread consistency this is really what we want and before we go on I'd like to suggest that replication is one sign of mastery but you have to know that the replication occurred under conditions where it wouldn't have happened without a level of mastery great exercise for you would be to have a friend make an EQ setting that you can't see have them set it up in a program like Pro Tools or logic and then you can take a listen to with pink noise or your favorite song or whatever something you know the sound of really well grab an EQ and try to undo whatever it was that they did when you're done compare your EQ and your friends EQ and see if they are exactly opposite if not pay attention to the frequency ranges that were difficult for you to figure out see if after maybe five or ten times there are any patterns to what you're doing have your friend make sure to save all the different EQ s they apply and every now and then revisit some without telling you take a good look at all the times you encountered the same EQ and compare those especially do this every day for a month and watch your results after a while when you first take a listen to your friends random EQ setting you'll notice yourself imagining what the opposite EQ would be before you even start working on it and you'll gain a pretty thorough understanding along the way of what EQ is and what it does so you'll gain both of the important elements we talked about vision and skill and you're proving to yourself that you can replicate results because of mastery over the skill not just random chance or whatever and before we dive into system tuning I need to be clear that I'm not going to say that there's one right way to tune a system I'm just saying that you'll need both vision and skill and that repeatability is a strong sign of mastery just keep that in mind for the rest of this video okay so now as far as system tuning goes this is a huge topic and I'm probably gonna oversimplify and go on tangents and make a bunch of people mad at me it'll be great so there's a few standard methods I'd like to explore before I show you my settings over the past six years at the Salem Art Fair the first method is essentially feedback avoidance you might see this with monitor engineers were gained before feedback especially for lead vocal mics and what not is the most important thing even almost ahead of general sound quality I know an engineer who was specifically hired to mix monitors for an event that was being broadcast live and he was told that his number one job was to make sure there was no feedback ever sound quality on stage was completely secondary to the quality of the broadcast for millions of people and so it goes that they took the microphone out on stage and turned it up until things fed back and they used very fine eq adjustments to eliminate the problem frequencies like a game of whack-a-mole a job well done also to be honest there's a lot of artists out there that are nearly deaf from their hard years of touring and they don't really care how it sounds as long as it's insanely loud so this might be a great method for that situation as well and again the point would be that if you had to go out there and ree cue the monitors this way ten times in a row would all your settings end up looking the same they should I mean the problematic frequencies aren't going anywhere another common method is to grab a microphone that we're all pretty familiar with like a shure sm58 especially one with a dent in it and use the sound of your own voice to EQ the system until it sounds a smoother as faithful as possible alternatively some people put on their favorite rock-and-roll tune and EQ the system to that besides the fact that it might be a good starting point to EQ the system for probably the most common microphone used in live sound or a musical track that most represents the performance to come there's an important logic to this method which involves a comparison to some known standard so a method which uses this kind of comparison to a much more refined degree involves setting up a microphone with a flat frequency and phase response and then measuring the sound system using pink or white noise because we already know what those kinds of noises are supposed to sound like they're mathematically derived and then we can use analyzing software to EQ the system until it faithfully reproduces the noise without adding or subtracting anything from it an even more advanced technique takes the output from the mixer itself and compares it to the test microphone input and so we can get a sense of how faithful the system is being no matter what sound were putting through it this method is great because it can be used in real time during the show no need to blast annoying sounds for hours during setup until everybody hates you you're the sound engineer everybody hates you and if already by the way you can get really sophisticated here and have software that automatically applies corrective EQ to the system so that even when the system tuning shifts because the room fills up with people or the temperature changes the system will sound as consistent as possible over time this method also has some other advantages for one it's probably the strongest of the industry standards if you do it correctly and somebody complains that they don't like how it sounds you can hide behind the fact that well it's the standard go away also because it's such a standard things translate really well on it if you mix the show last night on a system which was tuned successfully with this method and you saved your mix on a USB stick and load it on the system tonight which has also been tuned with this method your mix should sound about the same as long as everything else like the microphones and the positions stays the same many many hours have been devoted to explaining how to tune systems this way so I won't spend any more time on it here you can go on a date with Google sometime and learn more about it now I use the techniques involved in this process quite often for system analysis back at the shop or for my own education but and this is where it gets interesting to me for the last 10 years or so I've actually moved away from using this method unless I'm in a situation that absolutely requires it like if I'm the system tech for a festival with people bringing in their USB sticks and expecting a system tune flat but if I'm the system tech and I'm mixing the show which is about 95 percent of my work I just use my ears to tune the system to where it sounds as smooth as possible if you care to stick around until the end of the video I'll tell you what materials I used to tune the system now I'm actually not going to make an argument here that this is in any way better than any other method or that I have some well-founded objective philosophy behind it I actually landed at this method purely through trial and error let me explain after years of tuning systems to be perfectly flat fitting very well into the industry standard and then sitting down to the shop after the shows and sifting through my channel EQ settings I began to notice a pattern there were of course EQ decisions that were specific to the individual channels in the mix you know maybe someone just had a really muffled voice and I had to add a bunch of high frequency or whatever but there was a core set of EQ decisions that seemed to pop up almost everywhere like on every channel to one degree or another for example I was always cutting out a bunch of 400 Hertz and 2.5 k and i was often boosting the super low frequencies below 50 Hertz on kick drum and bass guitar I got really precise about my analysis and ended up compiling what I called my default channel EQ around the same time I learned about Fletcher Munson curves which document how our ears don't work like flat microphones our ears actually hear different frequencies with different volumes check this out do you see anything similar about these two pictures I did and so like a wall of magic unicorns hitting me in the face I connected the dots and decided that I would start tuning the entire PA system with my default EQ in the beginning the main motivation was actually quite logical I wanted to free up more channel EQ bands so that I could be making more decisions with them that were actually particular to the specific channel to my surprise I began having clients and other engineers tell me that they really enjoyed using my system tuning and they'd ask what method it was I didn't have an answer for them I just kind of said something about using pink noise because at least that sounded a bit more standardized and official I would even continue to set up my test microphone out by the mixer so I felt and looked more legitimate but I hardly ever used it and sometimes I didn't even plug it in what but after years of this resulting in successful shows and happy clients even enduring rigorous aiibi testing against other standardized methods I'm pretty sold on doing it this way whenever possible or at the very least I now have a really consistent default EQ that I can quickly apply to systems that have been tuned flat which gets me most of the way there and I only have to spend a few minutes tweaking it into perfection however I noticed that after some time when I had amassed an incredible amount of presets and scenes and shortcuts around this default EQ business I was in a situation where I had to tune a system from scratch and didn't have any of my equipment and I was a bit rusty sure the show went well and it sounded good but I could tell my ears just weren't as sharp as they were back when I was struggling through the transition in my tuning methods and doing a lot of critical listening and experimenting from scratch I decided to ditch all of my presets and take the time and effort to do the tuning by ear from scratch each time I eventually got pretty fast at it and the benefits spread into other areas of my mixing because my general listening skills are being kept on their toes in a different way than regular mixing does so when you're just mixing most of the decisions you're making are more or less subjective or to taste but when I'm tuning a system by ear the Fletcher Munson curves essentially become the reference and that exercises a different kind of listening ability than merely liking or disliking sounds on the fly I had a good laugh years later when I was around an engineer who was a fervent advocate of the flat system tuning method quite skilled actually and they had all their mics and computers set up and after about half an hour of staring into the console screen when they were done tuning they realized the insert point on the EQ plugin wasn't even on their ears had literally shut down from disuse and they had come to completely rely on the graphs and numbers and I told myself I never want that to happen to me again I do frequently pull out the mics and software when I'm doing serious troubleshooting or when I'm catering to people who are expecting a flat system tuning but I try as much as I can to not let my ears relax over it and again my main point here is that whatever system tuning you choose the ability to replicate it over time under similar conditions is a great marker of mastery so you should be doing ear training exercises regularly even if you're full-time mix engineer a great concert pianist will still practice scales and arpeggios on into their careers world-class violinists do basic warm-ups before going on stage why shouldn't sound engineers beyond their ear training iPhone apps before set up in soundcheck right so let's have a look at some of my system tunings from the last six years mixing at the Salem Art Fair where we've had the same Nexo line array in Yamaha mixer for a while you Hey look they're pretty similar it's probably the result of a lot of hours of doing simple ear training exercises on long drives and stuff and you can do the same thing too so for anyone still listening my typical tuning process starts with repeating sine sweep from 200 Hertz down to 20 Hertz and I checked for crossover alignment and general smoothness of the bass response from there I play a looping segment of a song called dream is collapsing from the inception soundtrack because it's extremely thick and full range almost like pink noise and it contains classical instruments which provide a much stronger natural sonic standard than most pop instruments I've written elsewhere on the Internet about why this is if you care to go look it up I then use pink noise to confirm that I've mostly smooth things out and end with Joe Satriani time machine because again it's very thick and it'll quickly reveal how the system sounds at high volume levels there's a few other methods I didn't mention here perhaps if this video gets enough attention I'll do a part to let me know in the comments how you like to tune your systems and remember to like and follow alpha sound and then share this video with someone who also likes tuning sound systems thanks for watching

Channel: ALPHA SOUND

Views: 58,061

Rating: 4.913693 out of 5

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Id: 1IbvhgfGEhU

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019