Live Process:

This is an excerpt from a livestream I engineered for the Elmhurst University Jazz Ensemble. For this stream I led a team of students ranging from freshmen to juniors that were currently enrolled in the Studio Techniques class that semester or had expressed interest but were unable to enroll. During setup, I walked them all through setting up a the console and digital snake, using sub-snakes, basic microphone placement and stage/set dressing. During the shows, I divided different tasks among the team including operating the OBS scene I created for the concert, mixing monitors and monitoring the stream audio/video. For the stream I created overlays in Adobe Photoshop, Scenes and Profiles in OBS, and interfaced with an installed camera as well as bringing my own as a back-up.

This was a standard Jazz Ensemble with 5 Saxes, 4 Trombones, 5 Trumpets, Grand Piano, Guitar, Bass, Drums and a Vocalist. The total inputs for this livestream were 28, Every horn was miced with a Shure Beta 98H/C mounted to their bell while the Alto and Tenor saxophones were recorded with Audio Technica AT8035 Shotgun Microphones. The Baritone Sax was recorded with a MXL 991 small diaphragm pencil condenser. The Piano was recorded with a pair of Shure Beta 181 side address pencil condensers mounted inside the piano. This allowed me to entirely close the lid and cover it with its blanket cover for maximum isolation in the room. The guitar was recorded with an SM57 roughly 3 inches away from the grill of the amp and an inch offset from the center of the speaker cone. The Bass was recorded from a DI Out on the amp head. The drums were recorded with a Shure PGA52 on the Kick Drum, a PGA56 clipped on the snare and each tom, an MXL 991 on the Hi Hat and Two PGA81s in a spaced pair as overheads. The vocalist was recorded with a Shure SM86. There was also a SM57 for a soloist microphone where brass players would go to stand and solo. There was also an announcement microphone for the director of the ensemble which was a SM58. The console I used was a Yamaha TF5. On the console, I processed each track individually, but since the consoles USB output captures pre processing, I chose to use mostly bus processing in my mix.

Mixing:

In this session, I used the new features in Protools 2020 to contain all of my tracks in Folder Tracks. The entire Sax section was subgrouped, as well as the Trombones, Trumpets, Drums and the Stereo Piano mics. On my Sax bus, I used the Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain as a channel strip, applying a HPF at 80 Hz, LPF at 15 kHz and compression. My Trombone bus had Waves Q4 to apply EQ. Here I made a HPF at 50hz, a slight bell boosting the fundamentals of the trombones between 70 Hz and 300 Hz and another bell reducing a range between 1 kHz and 8 kHz by -3dB. After the EQ, I used Waves H-Comp to apply compression to the bus. My Trumpet bus again used the Waves Q-Series EQ to apply a HPF at 75 Hz and a high shelf at 1260 Hz which boosted the higher frequencies by 4.1dB. After that I used an 11-76 emulator to apply compression. For all of these tracks, I panned the instruments to where they would be if the band were set up in its normal format, with each section spreading left to right by their input number. No section was panned further than 25% away from center.

Some of my drum tracks were processed individually. On my Kick Drum track I used Scheps Omni Channel to apply EQ which was a slightly wide bell boosting 3 kHz by 6.8dB to bring out the beater hitting the drum. After the EQ, I added compression. The snare track was similarly processed with Scheps Omni Channel, but I added a HPF at 163 Hz, a gate, a high shelf EQ cutting 11.2 kHz by -3 dB and compression. My Tom 1 and 2 tracks were sent directly to the bus without any processing. Finally, my Hi Hat and Overhead tracks each had the Waves Q series EQ to apply a HPF at 1 kHz. The panning for these tracks mirrored the drummers perspective, placing Snare and Kick at the center of the mix and putting Tom 1 and 2 slightly on opposite sides. The Hi Hat was placed slightly to the Left side and the Overheads were hard panned to Left and Right. These tracks were all sent to the Drum Bus where I had another instance of the Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain which applied compression.

My piano tracks were sent directly to their bus, and processed through Scheps Omni Channel. Here, I applied a HPF at 137 Hz, a slight gate to reduce the minimal bleed, and compression.

The Bass DI was also processed through Scheps Omni Channel, applying a HPF at 75 Hz to make sonic room for the kick drum to occupy. I also added EQ with a bell boosting 800Hz by 3.6 Hz and a high shelf cutting frequencies above 8 kHz by -9dB. After that, I added slight compression.

The Guitar Amp track was processed through Scheps Omni Channel as well, and had both a HPF and LPF at 171 Hz and 10.1 kHz set to 12dB per octave. No further EQ or Compression was applied.

The Vocal track was processed through Scheps Omni Channel, where I added a HPF at 117Hz, a 2 stage de-esser, EQ and compression. The de-esser was set to a High Shelf at 7.3 kHz and a Low Shelf at 126 Hz. My EQ was set to boost the fundamental tones of her voice to make it sound slightly thicker, for this I boosted 290Hz by 2dB with a slightly wide bell curve. Afterward I applied compression with considerable output gain to bring them further out in the mix.

Lastly, the Solo Mic had Scheps Omni Channel with a HPF set to 90Hz, EQ boosting 1kHz by 2.4dB and compression. I automated the mute for this channel to reduce bleed. When the saxophones solo, I would move that solo from the track in their section, to the solo mic track in order to process it separately from the sax bus which may have background lines that would effect the compression of the soloist.

All subgroups were automated to bring out phrases and to lower mics when sections were not playing to reduce bleed.

Track List

Effects:

For this session I used 3 reverb sends to emulate a plate reverb, a chamber, and another plate which was paired with a slap delay through Waves CLA EchoSphere. The first reverb was the Waves Abbey Road Chambers plugin set with a 75Hz bass cut. This reverb was fed from all of the horns and the piano sub groups. The second reverb was the Waves Abbey Road Plates set to a fairly dark plate, with an 80% damper, a 50Hz bass cut, and a 6dB treble boost. This reverb was fed directly from the Snare and Tom 1 and 2 tracks. The final reverb was CLA EchoSphere which offers a slap delay and plate reverb together. I applied a HPF at 60Hz to the slap delay and a HPF at 211Hz to the plate reverb. I adjusted the slap to 157ms and added a little feedback at 16.6%. The same signal that fed the delay also fed the plate. To this I added a pre-delay of 150ms and increased the reverb time to 1.8 seconds to give a large and spacious reverb at the end of the vocalists phrases.

Mastering:

Before exporting the songs, I added an L1+ precision limiter and iZotope Insight 2 for regulating levels and metering in LUFS. My LUFS target was set to -14 and I used the subgroup automation to reach my targets per individual song, as that was the format that the concert was released.