The Format We're ALL Gonna Have To Adopt???

100 000 subscribers we're nearly there before the end of october and i'm gonna do something make sure you subscribe get your friends to subscribe and ding that bell you're gonna really want to dig that bell in my last studio tour 2021 i spoke about the fact that i've installed a permanent 5.1 or surround setup this is because i think this is the way our industry is going apple is really pushing on with dolby atmos for both apple tv and music and it's all to do with these headphones that can actually kind of recreate it in stereo i approve of this because it complicates our profession re-professionalizes it so i thought i'd take you through what 5.1 is or surround sound is how i use it and some hard and fast rules that you should adhere to if you don't want your music to sound like crap when it's gone to the dubbing stage the only thing is it's very difficult to explain surround if you can't monitor in surround so i had an idea oh this is heavy [Music] don't know what i prefer it just standing above my head so it knocked me out of it fell or just falling straight into my crotch anyway this is a ku100 it's a binaural mic that uses no shadow and the ear shape to basically do what our ears do we only have two microphones yet we know where stuff is i'm hoping with this experiment you'll get a sense of what i'm doing with the front and the back the surrounds and the slight nuanced qualities between various different signals and how to achieve them it may not work but you need to put on headphones for it to stand a fighting chance so what is 5.1 well 5.1 refers to six speakers the left the right the center the left surround the right surround and you probably can't see down there is a big whopping great sub so instead of working with stereo waves we work with a six track 5.1 wav fully interleaved just like a stereo and many of you who do computer games know that these have been hacked to create stemming in real time on computer games but we'll be working in 5.1 now there are some hard and fast rules that if you don't listen to them you're going to get very disappointing results namely the one it's lovely to have a big sub to play with but it is not part of our base management the acronyms for the speakers are l r c l s rs and lfe an lfe stands for low frequency effects and in the world of film tv and games that is what that speaker is used for effects so if you start making it part of your base management and this what i call continuous program going into that speaker the dubbing engineers just simply going to mute it because they like to use that just at kind of key moments as a dramatic thing they don't want it rumbling away or rather they don't want your music rumbling over the rumble that they've put into it so things like tychos sonic booms and if you do that trick of putting a sine wave an octave under your bases maybe just for key moments but i wouldn't sit it in there for minute after minute because they get very nervous about it great so we've still got five speakers to have a lot of fun with well actually no the center speaker is where they put the dialogue and they really don't like anything else to go there and this is when we need to understand that writing in surround is all about spaces and this is when the different mediums actually split off and have slightly different disciplines for example with games and tv music you can pretty much keep the center speaker totally empty so you can work in quad or 5.0 with a mute center channel but when you're in large cinemas something called a black hole is created if you don't have anything in the center speaker and the left and right speakers are you know massively miles apart so for film certainly you need to put something in there so it doesn't feel like a total vacuum but again it's where the dialogue goes they get very very nervous if you put stuff like i don't know like a shakuhachi you want it to be in the nice in the center with the reverbs and delays coming out to the sides and surrounds it's just not good practice the other thing again that's really important to consider where space is concerned is what you do with the surrounds where film's concerned there's a thing called back dooring they don't like you to do stuff that makes the audience look behind them so we don't want stuff suddenly coming in although it's fun to do from behind them particularly in music because it's just distracting it takes people out of the film backdooring but the other thing to consider going back to that big cinema is if you put any rhythmic detail in the surrounds you'll get all sorts of timing difficulties because sound travels very slowly and in those big barns you'll get a real flaming effect i don't know if you've ever been to a festival and you've been walking up to the main stage and you just hear this that's all the speakers operating at slightly different times but again with games usually your listener is sitting in the sweet spot on their own so you can be a lot more adventurous with the surrounds and indeed i think the sound for games is a lot more adventurous than tv and film the problem with getting adventurous with the surrounds and the panning with tv is you need to imagine that a family is watching it not everyone is going to be in the sweet spot so if you really hard pan stuff particularly in the surrounds auntie maude over there is going to be getting loads of that and uncle mickey over here is going to be getting none of it it kind of reminds me of the old days of stereo when they put the drums in one speaker and the bass in the other so how do i go about putting stuff in the different speakers now this isn't a logic tutorial but for those of you who do use logic there may be a few tips that are helpful but the principles the same for whatever door you work on and indeed i would say that of all the doors pro tools is best equipped for surround so what i'm going to do is just get up a trusty contact just in stereo for now now what i have done is i've routed this to the device i used to record music in on digitally so you'll first hear the direct signal and then we'll switch to dave or the ku 100 so you can try and get a sense of what it's sounding like in surround so rooting basically you've got a bunch of channels coming out of your audio interface and you can just basically assign which channel is going where now if i go to default you'll see left is one right two left surround is three output four is right surround then center is five and lfe is six now the reason we don't go l c r l s r s lfe is to do with stereo pairing on desks and stuff like that and in fact i use the itu which is the more music way of doing it basically so you've got one and two left and right so that's a stereo pair for your main two speakers five and six which are a second stereo pair for your other two main speakers and then three and four which are ostensibly two mono channels one for your center one for your lfe so we've got our pizzicato [Music] now switching to ku 100 let's move it around [Music] which is a lot of fun using a yoke to move it all over the place you can also increase the lfe level if i just mute off all of the other speakers there she is the thing is this isn't as i've kind of alluded to this isn't really what surround mixing is about in music in my humble opinion for me it's all about immersion because i really believe you could dial up the emotion of the piece by making the person who's watching it feel that they're in and amongst it so for me these kind of pan tools not much use so a really useful use of the surround panel in logic is absolutely specifying which speakers you want the signal to go to stereo surround center and lfe right so what is the easiest way of taking just a stereo sample and creating a slightly more immersive version of it well what tends to happen it's the lazy route is that if you deliver your stuff in stereo the dubbing engineer will put some reverb on it that goes to the surrounds but i think intentionality is very important so i like to if i'm working in surround or delivering and surround i like to write in surround so that you're actually thinking about the various bits of information and where they're going so i'm going to show you how i set up a surround reverb without using a surround reverb this is particularly convenient if you're working in the box between various different collaborators so i'm just going to set up a bus and so this is going to be my left right reverb and then i'm going to have a center and surround and you'll notice that i'm not putting one in the lfe i mean it just it would be disastrous to put reverb in the low frequency effects channel it just creates all sorts of muddy rumble so let's set up single stereo mix 100 let's take the space down to 200 you may find that with surround stuff you may want to reduce the length of your reverbs because you've got kind of more space to work with i'm going to make this a little bit closer and put a pre-delay on now i'm going to copy that across and on the center channel i'm going to make it even shorter even closer no pre-delay and then on the surround channel i'm just going to take it up a bit far away don't know what that does and take this to 15. just so there's a real variety within the reverb so it really does give you that that quadraphonic separation if you will then what i need to do is just root that and there's two ways you can do that you can either put it into surround or i'm actually just going to put it direct out of these outputs and because this is going [Music] into the lfe we need to just pan that to the left no more so let's listen to it without reverb left and right [Music] lsrs take that down a bit and then c and again take that right back so this is what we've got going into the center just a little something that gives it a sense of of presence and then in the right surrounds so just pure reverb and then in the left and right a mixture of the two another nice thing to do for dreamy kind of immersive stuff is to use [Music] delays so what i'm going to do is create another bus this is going to be delays and i'm just going to make that go out of lsonrus [Music] the thing with that is you've got all of this reverb and then you've got this dry delay so again i would double root that back through to the verbs and it just should have a slightly more realistic sound which really is engulfing you but these i have to say in my humble opinion a fairly cheap ways of creating an immersive experience again the reason why i write in surround when i deliver in surround is intentionality and for me it's about being creative in a way that isn't invasive on your listener or indeed the other department's dialogue and sound effects something i love doing is using the different mic positions that we provide in spitfire to create a more immersive experience so what i'm going to do is actually just change this to a 16 time stereo multi output it seems like overkill i know and then if you go here and go to outputs you'll see you've got a bunch of different outputs here we're just going to use these two so what i'm going to do is click on that so let's listen to the tree and now the ambient you'll hear it's less direct so what we're going to do is activate the ambient and then just click on a and put it out stereo 2. then if we go down here click on that you can see it says contact 3 4 there and again we can select the output so let's make that go to lsrs so without with it just dumps you in the hall at air studios i'm just going to drop that back a little bit so this is behind us in front of us [Music] and that way i'm going to definitely use less reverb so we have much more definition we've got so much more to play with if you're writing contrapuntal music it basically means you can still be very cinematic in scope in epic wideness but with that just that slightly more control over the detail of your music even if you're just going from two speakers ostensibly to four so what i like to do is is really think that we're working in two stereo fields a great example is say for example the synth pad simply duplicate it and just alter the character of it very slightly and it's akin to tracking a vocal but instead of left and right back and front when i did the game alien isolation we recorded the orchestra twice over two different sessions front orchestra then we turned the tree round back orchestra so not only do you feel like you're in the room in air studios it feels like you're sitting in the middle of the orchestra which is a deeply emotional experience the way that we can imitate that kind of experiment is to say take i've done this on this last film that i was working on so what i'm going to do is take the main techniques here and let's use the circular bowing which is great now what i'm going to do is use the close here and instead of assigning the room to a different output i'm actually going to do another iteration of the same sample so i'm going to do circular and then i'm going to use the same microphone so really up front now if i play this it's going to basically play two of everything it's gonna be all fazey so what i want to do is my track and stack technique of let's go up four have that coming out of the same port so you're here [Music] that's out of that one and then this one [Music] so that's basically accessing this sample so then what we want to do and it's always better to tune down because samples sound better tuned down is take that down [Music] yeah that's a different sample and then what we'll do is we'll just take this out of a different output so let's put that out of there [Music] and then in this surround version [Music] and then let's put a bit of reverb on both of those [Music] now in logic you can create all sorts of routings so you can create 5.1 stems if you look here there's the opportunity to convert your buses into surround buses and in fact i've just been building or rebuilding that template that i showed you in the video linked above to accommodate the fact that actually we need to work in 5.1 so let's just have a quick look at that and you can see how i've distributed stuff around so the stacks are ostensibly what would be my multi-track so it's winds long when short folks longs folks sure i don't know if i'm going to be getting this mixed by a professional but if i am i'll simply bounce the stacks but then what we're doing is we're aggregating down to some stems 11 in total so 10 stems and one sum these are currently muted and grouped together so if i want to unmute them so those are the tracks that we're rendering to if you will and you'll see that these again are all 5.1 a bust via these surround buses but what i'm monitoring in is a duplicate but just with auxiliary so i don't need to put anything live and basically just to be super safe when i lay this stuff down i'll mute those and unmute those so i'm absolutely listening to what's going to tape so i'm quite proud of the the beauty of all of this if you look at the buses we've got all of our stacks then we have our individual instruments all the way down to soloists here and then we have matching the numbers here we have reverbs for each stem it's really important that we have a separate reverb receive and send for each stem so that reverbs don't go into the wrong stem so you've got some drum reverbs going into your wins stem which is why if we go back to one of these folders here we've got our stem verbs so here you see 101 101 101 so we've got those left right center surround then 102 times 3 for the lcr lsrs all routing back into bus two and then if you come back here you'll see that we've got bus one bus two in the auxiliaries and bus one bus two in the tracks and then everything goes to bus 11 which sums there and out to the speakers so that's my workflow in 5.1 now if there's anything that you want to ask me about with regards 5.1 please put it in the video description down below there is one more stage and that is it's customary to produce stereo fold downs from your surround mix i'll leave that for another day to show you how you can do it both manually in your door but also with down mixer plugins that kind of stuff so leave your comments in the video description down below and as i say i think it's a very interesting development in our fields not just for film tv computer games but for all music and i'm all for it because yes it makes our jobs more complicated and more professional but also just because it's so much fun thanks as always for watching to the end do subscribe if you haven't done really trying to get to 100k before the end of october it'll be well worth your while and ding that bell it's going to be really important if you want to take part in the thing one of those always much appreciated see you next time

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 30,181

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: VPDoHfSs3Vo

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021